Feel the force: Three new books look at power in the digital age
From The Economist:
To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. By Evgeny Morozov. PublicAffairs; 415 pages; $28.99. Allen Lane; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
Who Owns the Future? By Jaron Lanier. Simon and Schuster; 397 pages; $28. Allen Lane; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business. By Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. Knopf; 319 pages; $26.95. John Murray; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
SILICON VALLEY is synonymous with sunshine, in outlook as much as
climate. Young men and women wear shorts to work, earn six-figure
salaries and blithely claim they are trying to make the world “more open
and connected”. Three new books, including two by consummate insiders,
show how a new, much stronger ingredient has been added to the
technology industry’s already potent mix of youth and optimism: power.
Evgeny Morozov, who sees himself as an outsider looking in, is a
harsh critic of Silicon Valley’s vanities. His first book, “The Net
Delusion” (2011), took apart the much-repeated claim that technology and
social networking are in themselves good for democracy. Instead, he
argued that technology is the perfect tool for repressive states to
control their citizens. His sprawling new work, “To Save Everything,
Click Here”, goes further.
Mr Morozov attacks the technologists’ urge to solve the world’s woes by
“recasting complex social situations as neatly defined problems”. He
calls such an attitude arrogant. Silicon Valley’s obsession with data—a
quantitative approach to solving problems that has been taken up by
Google, among others—ignores subtlety and analytical thought. If people
allow geeks to run the world, he says, everyone will be posting the
contents of their rubbish bins on Facebook and monitoring themselves
around the clock in the name of science and efficiency. This is power
wielded without wisdom.
Mr Morozov has made a name for himself by attacking his peers, and
his critics dismiss him as an attention-seeker. A snarky, hectoring tone
certainly detracts from his argument, something which cannot be said of
Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist who popularised the term “virtual
reality” and who now works for Microsoft. As Mr Lanier admits many times
in his new book, “Who Owns the Future?”, he is part of what he
criticises, and he benefits from actively participating in the schemes
he would like to see ended.
Mr Lanier’s views have been shaped by his side career as a musician.
Instead of ushering in a new age of prosperity, he says, the tech
industry is making the world poorer. Jobs in creative professions, such
as music and writing, have disappeared, thanks to the ease of
communication and copying. More traditional middle-class jobs are surely
next....MORE
