David B. Auerbach - Meganets: How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities
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- Book:Meganets: How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities
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Meganets: How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities: summary, description and annotation
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David Auerbachs exploration of the phenomenon he has identified as the meganet begins with a simple, startling revelation: There is no hand on the tiller of some of the largest global digital forces that influence our daily lives: from corporate sites such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, YouTube, Instagram, and Reddit to the burgeoning metaverse encompassing cryptocurrencies and online gaming to government systems such as Chinas Social Credit System and Indias Aadhaar.
As we increasingly integrate our society, culture and politics within a hyper-networked fabric, Auerbach explains how the interactions of billions of people with unfathomably large online networks have produced a new sort of beast: ever-changing systems that operate beyond the control of the individuals, companies, and governments that created them.
Meganets, Auerbach explains, have a life of their own, actively resisting attempts to control them as they accumulate data and produce spontaneous, unexpected social groups and uprisings that could not have even existed twenty years ago. And they constantly modify themselves in response to user behavior, resulting in collectively authored algorithms none of us intend or control. These enormous invisible organisms exerting great force on our lives are the new minds of the world, increasingly commandeering our daily lives and inner realities.
Auerbachs analysis of these gargantuan opaque digital forces yield important insights such as:
- The conventional wisdom that the Googles and Facebook of this world are tightly run algorithmic entities is a myth. No one is really in control.
- The efforts at reform - to get lies and misinformation off meganets - run into a brick wall because the companies and executives who run them are trapped by the persistent, evolving, and opaque systems they have created.
- Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are uncontrollable and their embrace by elite financial institutions threatens the entire economy
- We are asking the wrong questions in assuming that if only the Facebooks of this world could be better regulated or broken up that they would be better, more ethical citizens.
- Why questions such as making algorithms fair and bias-free and whether AI can be a tool for good or evil are wrong and misinformed
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Meganets will forever change the way you think about the digital world. It is an eye-opening account of the relationships we createand which are often created for usonline. It is the foundational book explaining the sweeping social changes that created our present and will transform tomorrow. David Auerbach has written both a warning and a blueprint for a better future.
Amy Webb , CEO, the Future Today Institute, and author of The Big Nine and The Genesis Machine
Auerbach has written a fascinating, mind-expanding book that is not about the future of technology but about the future of society. We are still early in our journey toward understanding how the interaction of data and computing are fundamentally changing our lives. Meganets gets us further down that road. Two important takeaways for me: First, the metaverse is not some future stateit is here now, expanding and evolving daily. And second, algorithms dont run the worldthey create a rich, sometimes productive, and sometimes toxic new ecosystem that is an organic interaction of humans and machines already well beyond any person, company, government, or algorithms control.
Alan Murray, CEO, Fortune Media, and author of Tomorrows Capitalist
Auerbachs Meganets warns the networked systems that channel our words, images, and ideas are already too complex for humans to govern, however we might try. A necessary book, bracing in places, but not without hope.
Jordan Ellenberg , author of How Not to be Wrong
Auerbach is the opposite of a conspiracy theorist: he explains how theres often ultimately no person, institution, or discernable group behind big systems and the events they shape. Hes interested in how to deal with that factbuilding up responsive structures instead of tearing anything down.
Jonathan Zittrain, George Bemis Professor of International Law and professor of computer science, Harvard University
Auerbach knows better than anyone that the very act of writing about technology is an assertion of the preeminence of the human. His signature command of conscience and fact make his work that rarest thing: indispensable.
Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of The Natanyahus
How often do we hear people vainly protestBut Im not on social media!as if the problems we confront in our new technological reality could be solved by individual lifestyle choices alone? In fact, the forces that shape our online experience jumped the fence long ago, and there is now no protective barrier between the digital and the real, between our online experience and our experience of the entirety of social reality. Algorithms and gamification shape our newsfeeds, but they also shape our transportation routes, our credit ratings, our labor, and even our health. This new reality requires a big-picture thinker ready to take on the problem in all its complexity, and Auerbach proves himself more than up to the task. In stunning, lucid prose and with unsparing analytical acumen, Meganets reveals just how profoundly our world has been transformed over the past generation of technological innovation. Auerbach offers no easy answers, yet the depth of his expertise and the far-reaching scope of his vision already provide a model for the sort of thinking we will need if the beast we have summoned is ever to be tamed.
Justin E. H. Smith, Universit Paris Cit, author of The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is
Copyright 2023 by David B. Auerbach
Cover design by Pete Garceau
Cover image iStock/Getty Images
Cover copyright 2023 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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First Edition: March 2023
Published by PublicAffairs, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The PublicAffairs name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Auerbach, David (David B.), author.
Title: Meganets : how digital forces beyond our control are commandeering our daily lives and inner realities / David B. Auerbach.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : PublicAffairs/Hachette Book Group, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022029526 | ISBN 9781541774445 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781541774438 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Internet governance. | InternetSocial aspects. | Metaverse.
Classification: LCC TK5105.8854 .A94 2023 | DDC 004.67/8dc23/eng/20221017 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029526
ISBNs: 9781541774445 (hardcover), 9781541774438 (ebook)
E3-20230203-JV-NF-ORI
For Eleanor and Iris
Bitwise: A Life in Code
Your life has a limit, but knowledge has none.
Zhuangzi
Galloping in unceasing flow ever ahead, denied any further control over their fate, the disconsolate company were borne terribly over the edge of the visible world.
Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day
Woes by wrong imaginations lose the knowledge of themselves.
Shakespeare, King Lear
F or all the mastery and knowledge that humans have obtained over nature, from charting the movements of the planets to machine-assisted flight to the mapping of genomes, there remain areas in which our chief accomplishment has been to realize the limits of our understanding and control. Take the chaotic system known as the weather. Despite all the technology deployed to monitor the skies, the tides, and everything in between, our predictions can still be so inaccurate as to be unable to predict whether a hurricane will hit a city tomorrow or whether it will rain in a particular space an hour later. The weather system is too complex, too chaotic, too nonlinear to allow for perfect fine-grained predictions. Much the same holds for the tectonic plates beneath the earths surface: we monitor them incessantly but still cannot anticipate when the next big earthquake will hit. And there is the brain itself, where the deeper we delve, the more we find difficulties in determining how our minds arise from this mass of tissue and neurons.
In human society, economics has steadfastly proven resistant to any sort of high-confidence modeling, leading to its moniker the dismal science. We may approximate the purchases and sales of herds of people and corporations at a macrolevel, but the flows of commerce remain frustratingly susceptible to sudden and unpredictable shocks, whether in the economic crisis of 2008 or in the wild fluctuations and multiple crashes of the trillion-dollar Bitcoin cryptocurrency.
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