How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital A =?utf-8?Q?ge_by_Andrew_Keen_=E2=80=93_review_=

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: March 4, 2018 at 11:12:15 AM EST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital A 
> =?utf-8?Q?ge_by_Andrew_Keen_=E2=80=93_review_=
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen – review
> As the internet giants run amok, a visionary critic calls for governments and citizens to tackle a crisis of historic 
> proportions
> By John Naughton
> Mar 4 2018
> <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/04/how-to-fix-future-staying-human-digital-age-andrew-keen-review>
>
> Many years ago the cultural critic Neil Postman predicted that the future of humanity lay somewhere in the area 
> between the dystopian nightmares of two English writers – George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Orwell believed that we 
> would be destroyed by the things we fear – surveillance and thought-control; Huxley thought that our undoing would be 
> the things that delight us – that our rulers would twig that entertainment is more efficient than coercion as a means 
> of social control.
>
> Then we invented the internet, a technology that – it turned out – gave us both nightmares at once: comprehensive 
> surveillance by states and corporations on the one hand; and, on the other, a strange kind of passive addiction to 
> devices, apps and services which, like the drug soma in Huxley’s Brave New World, possess “all the advantages of 
> Christianity and alcohol and none of their defects”.
>
> The great irony, of course, is that not all of this was inevitable. Granted, the technology always had an intrinsic 
> capacity for surveillance because of the way it works. But it also had the great emancipatory, democratising 
> potential celebrated by the legal scholar Yochai Benkler in his landmark 2006 book, The Wealth of Networks. But that 
> potential has, for the most part, not been realised. What has happened instead is that the internet has been captured 
> by a small number of American companies, which are amplifying inequality (creating unimaginable wealth for their 
> owners while employing very few people), polluting the public sphere and undermining democracy. And the same outfits 
> are now racing ahead to enhance the artificial intelligence technology that will entrench their dominance.
>
> Confronted with this challenge, our societies seem like rabbits caught in the headlights of a truck. True, our 
> legislators are belatedly waking up to the scale of the problem, but at the moment their responses seem either banal 
> (see Theresa May’s bleating about social media) or self-defeating (Germany’s outsourcing of decisionsabout what 
> should be published, or censored, to Facebook and Twitter). The intellectual bankruptcy of these reactions suggests 
> that our leaders have not yet understood the scale of the revolution under way, which is also why they have no idea 
> what to do about it – and why so much commentary about our digital future has a dystopian air.
>
> Into this maelstrom steps Andrew Keen, a tech commentator who never drank the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid. In three 
> earlier books – The Cult of the Amateur, Digital Vertigo and The Internet Is Not the Answer – he provided an ongoing, 
> scathing critique of tech evangelism. His scepticism now looks prescient: he understood the significance of what was 
> happening earlier than most.
>
> With his new book, Keen switches from sarcasm to a kind of pragmatic optimism. Our digital future can be shaped in 
> more humane directions, he argues. But for that to happen we need to be realistic about the scale of the challenge, 
> to learn from history and accept that there are no magic bullets or technological fixes. Like Churchill, he offers 
> mostly blood, sweat and tears; but at least he has a programme of what needs to be done.
>
> A key plank in this platform is that the dominant digital technologies of the future must not be proprietary, but 
> open. And there must be real competition in digital markets. This means that governments have to update antitrust 
> laws for a digital age in which winner-takes-all outcomes are routine, and enforce them rigorously. Monopolistic 
> abuses should be prosecuted and punished. Mergers and acquisitions that were once waved through (Google’s acquisition 
> of DoubleClick, for example, or Facebook’s of WhatsApp) should be scrutinised sceptically. Competition lawyers should 
> be crawling all over the hidden, high-speed ad-trading markets operated by Google and Facebook. And so on.
>
> Second, we need to protect the public sphere on which all democracies depend. Facebook and Twitter – and, in some 
> areas, Google – should be treated and regulated like the media companies they have become. The era when we were 
> suspicious of Rupert Murdoch but indulgent towards Mark Zuckerberg is over. Tech companies should be held responsible 
> for the harms they do.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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