The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

Most important was the idea that grounds much of this book: that antitrust represented a democratic choice of economic structure and a check on the political and economic power of the monopolies.

As it happened, the transformation in Hollywood content was so abrupt as to be shocking, and it demonstrates a substantial vulnerability of highly centralized systems: while designed for stability’s sake, they are in fact susceptible to extremely drastic disruption.

But the state’s role, while significant, cannot compare to the power of industry to censor expression or squelch invention.

The new monopolists of the Gilded Age preferred to believe that they were not merely profiteering, but building a new and better society. They were bravely constructing a new order that discarded

As Justice William Douglas would later put it, “power that controls the economy should be in the hands of elected representatives of the people, not in the hands of an industrial oligarchy.”