This Post Has 11 Comments

1. True to advertising
   I bought this used in good condition and that’s exactly what I got. This is a required common read for my first semester in college and I just so happen to be a computer science major so this boom is great. I have enjoyed reading it more than I thought and definitely more than my peers. It’s a great read if you are interested in tech and it’s affects on society/politics.

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2. Many questions
   This is an académico book that poses many important questions and highlights failed frameworks to date to answer those questions. The path proposed for the future is a Return to a level of organizational strength of the past but that seems very un likely for our future.

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3. A Must Read
   If you are involved in technology in any way, as a creator or as a user, this is a must read. What motivates tech companies and the people who create them? Answers here. Even more importantly, this book explains why it matters and how getting a handle on technology is critical for maintaining our democracy.The authors are experts not just academics but people who have worked in the industry and in government. Yet things are explained in a way that is approachable for just about anyone. This book will make you think.

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4. There’s Hope
   One tends to despair when faced with the enormity of the problems brought on by the excesses of social media and the enormous power of the big tech bosses. This book fills in the knowledge we non-techie people are lacking—along with some of the behind the scenes stuff we’ve missed—so that we can legitimately hope for more sensible control and governance of big tech and social media in the future.

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5. This book should be part of every college degree program…
   The range of material that this book covers is insane! The authors pull back the curtain on several ethical and political issues involving big tech companies. If you want to understand better exactly how big tech controls the lives of most everyone on earth (at least to some extent), then you need to read this book.

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6. Thoughtful and thought-provoking
   I learned a lot from this book. My takeaway is that algorithms that optimize for short-term attention grabbing and gratification can have many unintended costs, both for individuals and communities. Revealing and galvanizing.

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7. Interesting but very biased
   The authors of the book make a number of good points about the “optimization mindset” of big tech, which focuses on technical, engineering solutions to various problems in society without thinking about what effects their solutions will have on society. Or on the “growth mindset” of big tech which prioritizes explosive growth over everything else.But the authors don’t do really any legwork at all on understanding people with a different viewpoint than their own. For example, when it comes to AB 5, a state law here in California that gutted entire industries such as freelance journalism, the authors can’t seem to find any reason why people would object to it (saying essentially that in the book), and blame the passage of Prop 22 entirely on its funding by Uber and Lyft, as if voters in the dark blue state of California would just vote for anything that large corporations would put in front of them, and not on the fact that voters could see the destructive impact of the very sorts of regulations that the authors of this book are pushing for.That’s really my main issue with this book – it champions increased government regulation as if that was a magic cure for the techno-libertarian self-regulation of big tech that we have right now. It’s not. Regulation can be good or bad, and the fact that the authors supported bad legislation like AB 5, without even apparently bothering to check the arguments against it (they stated they didn’t know why people opposed it), tells you everything you need to know about the bias in this book. Regulation good, self-regulation bad, end of story.

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8. Important book
   The book arrived early, in perfect condition.

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9. The words fly off the pages easily of this book, I finished the whole thing in about four days. The perspective is completely American, unfortunately, the authors, while knowing very well that their book would sell in places like here, show no regard to tailoring their content for them. I bought the book basically because I got it at a throwaway price, and the title piqued my curiosity – as a Bengali, it’s strange to think that there might be other places in the world which want to “run backwards”, as we do here. I wanted to find out what such people’s point of view was.The book touches on various facets of the digital revolution, one by one. It starts off by talking about the problems of the “optimization mindset”, and even as an ardent optimiser myself, I found that I wasn’t disagreeing with what the authors said – it was refreshing to encounter a point of view different from mine. Human beings are NOT designed to be “efficient”. It’s true. There was then talk of algorithmic decision making, including the question of say, how long a criminal should be sentenced for, and this was not applicable to India, because I have not yet heard of such decision making being left up to software here, yet at least. And we don’t have street crime here. The book then moves on to the question of privacy, and here I would disagree with the content in the book to some extent. The authors talk about how BigTech is surveilling us, however you have to note that practically all of the web, including something as incredible as Google Search is FREE! If the product itself is free, then you don’t really blame the companies for trying to target you with personalised advertising – it’s the only way they can survive! (and I find it somewhat wondrous that they do!) Note that I do NOT *LIKE* this concept, but the other option would be to pay for websites, and this would leave out, say, the Indian poor from accessing these websites, which would NOT be the desired outcome. Finally they move on to the question of AI displacing human jobs, which is of course what all the hullabaloo is about now, here MY personal opinion is that if a piece of software replaces a human at a particular job, did that human *WANT* to be doing a job that a machine can do in the first place?!! We are humans, we should be above that, shouldn’t we?Finally, the authors in the final pages talk about methods to bring BigTech to task and control them to deliver what HUMANITY wants, it was good to read this part.On the whole, I would say if you get this book cheap like I did, it might not be a bad read. Or for that matter, if you don’t.

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10. The authors detail where the Big Tech went wrong and how to reboot. They discuss the ethic of new technology and in particular AI, and how democracies can regulate effectively the Big Tech.

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11. Where we are in terms of social networking technologies in particular and their impact on democracy is frightening. The multiplicative effect on misinformation, irrational thinking, and misplaced anger has been tremendous and traumatic.The book System Error thoughtfully points out the importance of democracy and legal oversight. Getting our politicians to stop focusing on lobbyists and billionaire funded PACs and the establishing apolitical but government funded policy advisory groups on technology and science could be a good start to fixing the problems.And maybe we could also get big money out of politics and start taxing the super-rich like we disintegrated the 1950s and 1960s…

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