Taking on Silicon Valley Monoliths in the Old Town Bookstore

Taking on Silicon Valley Monoliths in the Old Town Bookstore

What a story Jonathan Taplin can tell. He used to be Martin Scorsese’s producer (Mean Streets) and tour manager for Bob Dylan and The Band. Icons of 20th century popular culture. He is also an internet entrepreneur, having started one of the first video on demand services (“Intertainer”). And then some. Now he is a writer and professor emeritus. His book Move Fast and Break Things (MacMillan 2017) has caused quite a stir.

Netopia’s readers are familiar with Jonathan Taplin, both from the interview he gave last summer and this writer’s re-occurring praise for his talk Sleeping Through a Revolution.

Taplin unmasks the idea of today’s internet as an inevitable outcome of technological progress, instead describing it as a product of ideology

It has been a great inspiration for my work, in particular the parts about the early days of the Google-founders Page and Brin, and superstar investor Peter Thiel at Stanford University in the late 80s.

Taplin unmasks the idea of today’s internet as an inevitable outcome of technological progress, instead describing it as a product of ideology. This insight should be encouraging for anyone who has issues with Silicon Valley’s big data monoliths.

From all these big words, the reader can tell I must have been excited to be part in introducing Jonathan Taplin’s work to the Swedish audience. In December, his book was released in Swedish and Taplin came to Stockholm to, among other things, give a talk in the Old Town Bookshop. See for yourself below (with introduction by Tobias Nielsén, founder of Volante publishing, and Q&A moderated by me, Per Strömbäck).

Direct link to video interview and presentation by Jonathan Taplin