The news of this book is being RUSHED so greatly, for reasons I can't fathom, that Random House doesn't even have the artwork ready -- despite the wonders of our digital age.
New book out by two figures I have often criticized on these pages (here, here, here), Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, and Jared Cohen, head of Google Ideas, Google's new think tank.
“The Internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history,” begins a new book written by two top Google executives, which aims to explain how this experiment will play out in politics, business and even personal lives.
Alfred A. Knopf publishers, a Random House imprint, said it would publish the book, titled “The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business,” in April.
But this is what I've tended to write about all this:
Why do I worry about someone who is merely overenthusiastic about cool tools? Because lurking underneath this is not frivolity at the end of the day, but the arrogant undermining of institutions, and of course, the use of the tools to push certain ideologies.
If I hadn't just been staring at pictures of Eric Schmidt partying with the Obama engineers on election night, I might be more hopeful about all this.
You know, at the risk of instigating yet another furious rant from Andrew Feinberg, yes, I did predict this back here.
It really has all been terribly troubling, watching how first Google and Twitter and other big social media platforms sucked up all our data, as they got us to upload other people's content which they sold ads against and waited for lawyers to chase them; then they moved from all that free and open web 2.0 goodness to Big Data, and the closed society that the Obama For America campaign represented, drilling, drilling, drilling for data and Getting Out the Vote.
The Silicon Valley geniuses created the tools, baked their ideologies into them, larded them with features to block, ban and remove dissenters, then drilled the data to GOTV. If other alternatives caught up in the intervening years, it might not be so terrible, but meanwhile, Sergey Brin is calling for a world with no political parties and Harper Reed is here to guide us all in the lovely open source cult of the authoritarian persona.
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