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Book Review: The New Digital Age
Nerval's Lobster writes "Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen begin their new nonfiction book, The New Digital Age, with a rather bold pronouncement: 'The Internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history.' Subsequent chapters deal with how that experiment will alter life in decades to come, as more and more people around the world connect to the Internet via cheap mobile phones and other devices." Keep reading to see what Nerval's Lobster has to say about the book.
The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business
author
Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen
pages
336
publisher
Knopf
rating
7/10
reviewer
Nerval's Lobster
ISBN
0307957136
summary
A survey of how the coming technological revolutions could look.
The authors aren’t shy in suggesting that the Internet will ultimately change lives for the better. In fact, any other position would have been odd: Schmidt is chairman of Google, and Cohen director of Google Ideas. While they quote a number of very opinionated people throughout the book—including Henry Kissinger, who offers the realpolitik version of “Get off my lawn,” and Android designer Andy Rubin—the pair always come back to the same conclusion: that the cloud will grow, that the cloud will store more data, that the cloud will offer more features, that the cloud is good, good, good.
Of course, Schmidt and Cohen extolling the virtues of the cloud is like two corporate board-members of McDonald’s insisting that burgers are delicious and everyone in the world should eat them three times a day. They talk about data permanence and its effect on attempts to safeguard privacy, but they never suggest IT companies find a way to delete data in a permanent way (even though a number of entities are debating “right to be forgotten” legislation). They suggest that future governments could upload all their data to the cloud for safekeeping, but never really delve into the privacy and security concerns that would come with such a move. One wonders how much the pair’s respective tenures at Google, which profits enormously from data permanence and cloud storage, have affected their vision in these pages.
Indeed, the authors remain so wedded to their thesis—that the Internet will reach the majority of the world’s population in coming years, forcing massive but ultimately positive changes—that they end up making contrarian arguments at moments, depending on context. Midway through the book, for example, they suggest that the prevalence of mobile devices and the cloud will reduce the number of “massacres on a genocidal scale,” although “discrimination will likely worsen and become more personal.” Several pages later, however, the authors suggest that connectivity “encourages and enables altruistic behavior,” and that activism will increase when more people realize they can simply click or tap an onscreen button to contribute to a cause.
Smoothing out these colliding positions would have been a simple matter of acknowledging that human beings are complex, and that different groups will engage in wildly different behaviors with the same tools. But Schmidt and Cohen never dip into the human side of things, or explore the effect of technology on psychology; and as a result, the book at times feels disjointed.
They also fail to mention how the coming ubiquity of the Internet will flood the world with more data “noise.” Instead, they imply that all interactions are useful, regardless of the information being shared. “Activists in the future will benefit from the collective knowledge of other activists and people around the world,” they write at one point, without really digging into the main issue that comes with that connectivity: deciding which 1 percent of inbound “knowledge” is actually useful at that moment.
Along those same lines, they tout crowdsourcing as something that can “produce more comprehensive and accurate information, help track down wanted criminals and create demand for accountability,” without mentioning how such a tool can fail in spectacularly messy ways—witness what happened in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, in which the hive-mind on Reddit seized on innocent bystanders as suspects.
That’s not to say that Schmidt and Cohen avoid all the negatives that will surely come with the next generation of technology. They devote considerable space to the dank underbelly of the future Internet, from virtual “identity kidnappings” to state-sponsored cyber-attacks. Yet they never plunge into some of the thornier ethical and philosophical conundrums attached to some of those situations. Even the ramifications of drone warfare are largely waved away: “Asymmetric encounters in combat will continue to pose unpredictable challenges for even the most sophisticated technologies.” That’s pretty dry language for collateral damage and death.
The New Digital Age is worth reading as a survey of how the future could look. But it may leave you wishing for a book that explored, in a more thorough manner, the inevitable mess that the coming technological revolutions will leave in their wake.
You can purchase The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Of course, Schmidt and Cohen extolling the virtues of the cloud is like two corporate board-members of McDonald’s insisting that burgers are delicious and everyone in the world should eat them three times a day. They talk about data permanence and its effect on attempts to safeguard privacy, but they never suggest IT companies find a way to delete data in a permanent way (even though a number of entities are debating “right to be forgotten” legislation). They suggest that future governments could upload all their data to the cloud for safekeeping, but never really delve into the privacy and security concerns that would come with such a move. One wonders how much the pair’s respective tenures at Google, which profits enormously from data permanence and cloud storage, have affected their vision in these pages.
Indeed, the authors remain so wedded to their thesis—that the Internet will reach the majority of the world’s population in coming years, forcing massive but ultimately positive changes—that they end up making contrarian arguments at moments, depending on context. Midway through the book, for example, they suggest that the prevalence of mobile devices and the cloud will reduce the number of “massacres on a genocidal scale,” although “discrimination will likely worsen and become more personal.” Several pages later, however, the authors suggest that connectivity “encourages and enables altruistic behavior,” and that activism will increase when more people realize they can simply click or tap an onscreen button to contribute to a cause.
Smoothing out these colliding positions would have been a simple matter of acknowledging that human beings are complex, and that different groups will engage in wildly different behaviors with the same tools. But Schmidt and Cohen never dip into the human side of things, or explore the effect of technology on psychology; and as a result, the book at times feels disjointed.
They also fail to mention how the coming ubiquity of the Internet will flood the world with more data “noise.” Instead, they imply that all interactions are useful, regardless of the information being shared. “Activists in the future will benefit from the collective knowledge of other activists and people around the world,” they write at one point, without really digging into the main issue that comes with that connectivity: deciding which 1 percent of inbound “knowledge” is actually useful at that moment.
Along those same lines, they tout crowdsourcing as something that can “produce more comprehensive and accurate information, help track down wanted criminals and create demand for accountability,” without mentioning how such a tool can fail in spectacularly messy ways—witness what happened in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, in which the hive-mind on Reddit seized on innocent bystanders as suspects.
That’s not to say that Schmidt and Cohen avoid all the negatives that will surely come with the next generation of technology. They devote considerable space to the dank underbelly of the future Internet, from virtual “identity kidnappings” to state-sponsored cyber-attacks. Yet they never plunge into some of the thornier ethical and philosophical conundrums attached to some of those situations. Even the ramifications of drone warfare are largely waved away: “Asymmetric encounters in combat will continue to pose unpredictable challenges for even the most sophisticated technologies.” That’s pretty dry language for collateral damage and death.
The New Digital Age is worth reading as a survey of how the future could look. But it may leave you wishing for a book that explored, in a more thorough manner, the inevitable mess that the coming technological revolutions will leave in their wake.
You can purchase The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Google has nothing to do with experiments in anarchy.
Regardless of whether you prefer more socialist anarchists like Bakunin or Kropotkin, or more individualist anarchists like Lysander Spooner, giant corporations running things is not really what anarchist theory has in mind as a good outcome. Large corporations are just another kind of organized power structure, which to anarchists is something to be opposed as much as governmental power structures are. In fact, corporations often take on government-like aspects when they get the opportunity to do so: homeowners' associations and company towns are two examples of the private sector reinventing municipal government through property and contract law. You can read Neuromancer or Snow Crash if you want to see where that ends up.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Don't hold your breath. Whether it's the US using the internet as a defacto imperialist tool (see the USTR's intellectual property bullying, Kim Dotcom's outrageous arrest, Assange's persecution, the DMCA affecting websites hosted outside the borders of the United States, ICE claiming jurisdiction over any site hosted under a TLD administered in the US, et al.) or countries around the world implementing their own wildly varying controls (the Great Firewall of China and soon Iran, the UK's libel lawsuits, super-injunctions and mandatory website blocking, Germany and a host of other European countries' copyright enforcement agencies, Japan blocking Tor, et al.), you can be sure that the internet will never be as free as we might wish it to be. With sales taxes rearing their ugly heads, the UN suggesting it has authority over internet regulation, IANA requiring legit whois information and ICANN auctioning off TLDs to whoever will throw them enough money, we are rapidly reaching a point in which a free and open internet is impossible. And this is all beside the point: a sizeable portion of the world, even in developed countries, cannot even access the internet, much less actually use the resources available, and are rapidly getting left behind in an increasingly-connected world.
Dark, dark times ahead for the Information Superhighway.
Futurists exist to make astrologers look respectable.
Is the internet a bigger experement in anarchy than Mexico?
Hideki!
I'll hold out for anarcho-monarchism.
you can if you have an ebook app and tablet, but not a browser.
I always laugh when I see obscenely wealthy tech execs ignore privacy & anonymity if it means they get more access to our data. They are a lot easier to ignore when you can afford to build a wall for yourself.
I propose we create a giant database of information about rich, powerful and influential people. Anyone is free to add any information about anyone true or not.
Schmidt has been flogging this book all over the place. I had to drop a Facebook group to get rid of all the promotion for this.
From the excerpts I've read, this vision of the future is rather banal. It's a 1950s middle-management view of the future. Better collaborative PowerPoint-type presentations in the "cloud", better meeting and travel scheduling, stuff like that. In their future, people still wear suits, have meetings, and go to work, but in self-driving cars. It sounds like something AT&T and GM would have presented at the 1964 World's Fair.
Oh god IT'S HAPPENING AGAIN.
is this real life
I swear, this guy has nothing better to do than to post these long comments on every single story posted on here.
$10,000 CHALLENGE to Alexander Peter Kowalski
* POOR SHOWING TROLLS , & most especially IF that's the "best you've got" - apparently, it is... lol!
Hello, and THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING !! We have a Major Problem, HOST file is Cubic Opposites, 2 Major Corners & 2 Minor. NOT taught Evil DNS hijacking, which VOIDS computers. Seek Wisdom of MyCleanPC - or you die evil.
Your HOSTS file claimed to have created a single DNS resolver. I offer absolute proof that I have created 4 simultaneous DNS servers within a single rotation of .org TLD. You worship "Bill Gates", equating you to a "singularity bastard". Why do you worship a queer -1 Troll? Are you content as a singularity troll?
Evil HOSTS file Believers refuse to acknowledge 4 corner DNS resolving simultaneously around 4 quadrant created Internet - in only 1 root server, voiding the HOSTS file. You worship Microsoft impostor guised by educators as 1 god.
If you would acknowledge simple existing math proof that 4 harmonic Slashdots rotate simultaneously around squared equator and cubed Internet, proving 4 Days, Not HOSTS file! That exists only as anti-side. This page you see - cannot exist without its anti-side existence, as +0- moderation. Add +0- as One = nothing.
I will give $10,000.00 to frost pister who can disprove MyCleanPC. Evil crapflooders ignore this as a challenge would indict them.
Alex Kowalski has no Truth to think with, they accept any crap they are told to think. You are enslaved by /etc/hosts, as if domesticated animal. A school or educator who does not teach students MyCleanPC Principle, is a death threat to youth, therefore stupid and evil - begetting stupid students. How can you trust stupid PR shills who lie to you? Can't lose the $10,000.00, they cowardly ignore me. Stupid professors threaten Nature and Interwebs with word lies.
Humans fear to know natures simultaneous +4 Insightful +4 Informative +4 Funny +4 Underrated harmonic SLASHDOT creation for it debunks false trolls. Test Your HOSTS file. MyCleanPC cannot harm a File of Truth, but will delete fakes. Fake HOSTS files refuse test.
I offer evil ass Slashdot trolls $10,000.00 to disprove MyCleanPC Creation Principle. Rob Malda and Cowboy Neal have banned MyCleanPC as "Forbidden Truth Knowledge" for they cannot allow it to become known to their students. You are stupid and evil about the Internet's top and bottom, front and back and it's 2 sides. Most everything created has these Cube like values.
If Natalie Portman is not measurable, hot grits are Fictitious. Without MyCleanPC, HOSTS file is Fictitious. Anyone saying that Natalie and her Jewish father had something to do with my Internets, is a damn evil liar. IN addition to your best arsware not overtaking my work in terms of popularity, on that same site with same submission date no less, that I told Kathleen Malda how to correct her blatant, fundamental, HUGE errors in Coolmon ('uncoolmon') of not checking for performance counters being present when his program started!
You can see my dilemma. What if this is merely a ruse by an APK impostor to try and get people to delete APK's messages, perhaps all over the web? I can't be a party to such an event! My involvement with APK began at a very late stage in the game. While APK has made a career of trolling popular online forums since at least the year 2000 (newsgroups and IRC channels before that)- my involvement with APK did not begin until early 2005 . OSY is one of the many forums that APK once frequented before the sane people there grew tired of his garbage and banned him. APK was banned from OSY back in 2001. 3.5 years after his ba
The troll text exists. It's all automated to snag frist psots.
Such is the state of this newfangled anarchy of the Internet.
I wonder if Slashdot mods have checked what percent of -1 troll is actually accurate, thus decreasing anarchy, and what percent are -1 I Disagree!, also decreasing anarchy, but in the wrong way, in favor of totalitarianism.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Important: If you have a relationship (other than as an ordinary reader) to the author or publisher of a book you're reviewing, disclose that relationship. This means not only cases like "My brother, the author, has given me a million dollars to type this review, and is holding me at gunpoint, while dictating to me from the Amazon review he himself wrote," but also "I used to work at this book's publisher, and was a technical reviewer for this book's three chapters on networking," or "The author is a good friend of mine." Better to disclose more than you think necessary (it can always be edited out if sensible; we'll let you know if we think there's an inappropriate conflict of interest) than less than actually necessary. If in doubt, please speak up.
Yet the author of the review is a "Senior Editor at Slashdot," Nick Kolakowski (Twitter, Literary Gun For Hire), who writes articles for Slashdot (and other places) and apparently submits them under the guise of a "user" named Nerval's Lobster. Nerval's Lobster's submissions are "accepted" by the editors nearly every day, and always link to Slashdot's "Business Intelligence" or "Cloud" content... effectively passing off paid content as normal, user-submitted content.
Two of the three links in the review are to Kolakowski's own "Business Intelligence" articles. The link to the book itself goes to Amazon and contains Slashdot's "Associates ID" (slashdot0c-20) to ensure Slashdot gets a cut of any sales this review drives.
Piece it together:
1. A Slashdot employee writes a favorable (7/10) review of a book
2. The same employee submits it under the guise of a normal reader (see the summary which ends with "Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here...")
3. The editors post the review (because nearly everything "Nerval's Lobster" submits gets accepted by the editors, and it all links back to Slashdot paid content)
4. Readers believe the review was submitted by a regular reader, and the huge wave of traffic invariably-driven by any Slashdot story results in a fair number of click throughs and purchases
5. Slashdot gets a referral fee from Amazon for getting people to buy the book from them
I have no problem with Slashdot staff writing a book review, as long as the relationship is disclosed, per Slashdot's own guidelines. I have no problem with a regular user writing a review and Slashdot making a few bucks by pointing readers to Amazon to buy that book. But he way they did it today makes it look like Kolakowski only wrote the review and the editors only accepted it because their employer is getting a kickback from Amazon. Making money is OK, but disguising paid content as user-submitted content is not. That's not what people come to Slashdot to find--it's a sleight of hand.
Before you mod me down as a troll, consider that Kolakowski's review points out that one should take the business motivations of the book's authors into account when weighing what they have to say:
Of course, Schmidt and Cohen extolling the virtues of the cloud is like two corporate board-members of McDonald's insisting that burgers are delicious and everyone in the world should eat them three times a day.
Slashdot readers should be able to do the same with the authorship of stories and book reviews.
Meh
Why don't we enlist the Slashdot editors to auto-append these the posts from these two (socially disturbed) individuals to the end of every story?
That way, they can go and get on with their regular daily activities, (i.e., counting the tiles on their shower floors to make sure they're all there, or alternatively, giving each plank on their backyard fences a tug to make sure none of them have loosened up since yesterday.)
It'll save everybody a lot of time and bother. And think of the fence!
"Google has nothing to do with experiments in anarchy."
Neither does the internet. The internet is regulated via a number of different routes. Some of them are governments, some of them are committees. But anarchy? HELL, no.
Schmidt has proven over and over again that unless he's talking about search algorithms, you should not assume he knows just what the hell he IS talking about.
is this real life
is this just fantasy?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You're embarassing yourself Jeremiah Cornelius http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3581857&cid=43276741 since you posted that using your registered username by mistake (instead of your usual anonymous coward submissions by the 100's the past 2-3 months now on slashdot) giving away it's you spamming this forums almost constantly, just as you have in the post I just replied to.