Winner of the 2011 Business Book of the Year AwardThe Internet Age: on the face of it, an era of unprecedented freedom in both communication and culture. Yet in the past, each major new medium, from telephone to satellite television, has crested on a wave of similar idealistic optimism, before succumbing to the inevitable undertow of industrial consolidation. Every once free and open technology has, in time, become centralized and closed; as corporate power has tak...

Attention merchant: an industrial-scale harvester of human attention. A firm whose business model is the mass capture of attention for resale to advertisers.In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of advertising enticements, branding efforts, sponsored social media, commercials and other efforts to harvest our attention. Over the last century, few times or spaces have remained uncultivated by the 'attention merchants', contributing to the distr...

We're three decades into a global experiment: what happens when the major nations of the world weaken their control on the size and power of corporate giants and allow unrestricted expansion?In The Curse of Bigness Tim Wu exposes the threats monopolies pose to economic stability and social freedom around the world. Aided by the globalization of commerce and finance, in recent years, we have seen takeovers galore that make a mockery of the ideals of competition and economic...

The pre-eminent exponent of anti-monopoly law explains why we have no option but to break Big Tech’s monopolies, and that doing so would unleash innovation and growth.‘Wu deftly breaks down one of the greatest challenges of our age - the unaccountable power of tech platforms - into such digestible pieces that the solutions for what to do become dead obvious’ KAREN HAO, author of Empire of AI'Tim Wu is a titan . . . a must-r...

Is the Internet erasing national borders? Will the future of the Net be set by Internet engineers, rogue programmers, the United Nations, or powerful countries? Who's really in control of what's happening on the Net? In this provocative new book, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu tell the fascinating story of the Internet's challenge to governmental rule in the 1990s, and the ensuing battles with governments around the world. It's a book about the fate of one idea--that the Internet might liberate...

From the man who coined the term "net neutrality," author of The Master Switch and The Attention Merchants, comes a warning about the dangers of excessive corporate and industrial concentration for our economic and political future.We live in an age of extreme corporate concentration, in which global industries are controlled by just a few giant firms -- big banks, big pharma, and big tech, just to name a few. But concern over what Louis Brandeis ...

What kind of world are we building for ourselves? That’s the question bestselling author Nicholas Carr tackles in his urgent new book, The Glass Cage, about the human consequences of automation.Digging behind the headlines about factory robots and self-driving cars, wearable computers and digitized medicine, Carr explores the hidden costs of granting software dominion over our work and our leisure. Even as they bring ease to our lives, computer programs are stealing something essen...

The pre-eminent exponent of anti-monopoly law explains why we have no option but to break Big Tech’s monopolies, and that doing so would unleash innovation and growth.Today’s dominant tech platforms – the places where we exchange information and buy things online – could be the most powerful engines of prosperity ever invented. Instead, they are the most effective instruments of wealth extraction ever created and a grave threat to our societies.Here the pre...

**Brought to you by Penguin.What does it mean for us all when death is treated as a glitch and Silicon Valley invests in the “science” of eternal life?**From the epic of Gilgamesh to the alchemy of the philosopher’s stone, humanity’s eternal quest for immortality – and its rejuvenation tricks, therapies and tinctures – has always been our most mortal endeavour.But now the giants of invention and investment are building a fountain of youth of their own creation: one ...

A “brilliant” (The Washington Post), “clear-eyed and incisive” (The New Republic) analysis of how the wealthiest group in American society is making life miserable for everyone—including themselves.In 21st-century America, the top 0.1% of the wealth distribution have walked away with the big prizes even while the bottom 90% have lost ground. What’s left of the American Dream has taken refuge in the 9.9% that lies just below the tip of extreme weal...

Brought to you by Penguin.The story of the ancient world’s most spectacular library, and the civilization that created itWhen a team of Victorian archaeologists dug into a grassy hill in Iraq, they chanced upon one of the oldest and greatest stores of knowledge ever seen: the library of the Assyrian emperor Ashurbanipal, seventh century BCE ruler of a huge swathe of the ancient Middle East known as Mesopotamia. After his death, vengeful riva...

**Brought to you by Penguin.The culture war is over. If you want it to be. It wasn’t even a culture war; it was a war on culture. A sustained attack, Dan Hicks argues, in the form of the weaponisation of civic museums, public art, and even universities — and one that has a deeper history than you might think.**Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, heritage, memory, and colonialism, Every Monument Will Fall joins the dots between the building of st...