Meganets
How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
How the autonomous digital forces jolting our lives – as uncontrollable as the weather and plate tectonics – are transforming life, society, culture, and politics.
David Auerbach’s 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 China’s Social Credit System and India’s 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.
Auerbach’s 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 economyWe 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 misinformedAuerbach then comes full circle, showing that while we cannot ultimately control meganets we can tame them through the counterintuitive measures he describes in detail.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this stimulating technical analysis, software engineer Auerbach (Bitwise) sounds the alarm about the rise of "meganets," or "autonomous networks" that might take the form of "big data, the cloud, the internet of things, blockchain, augmented reality, or the much-ballyhooed metaverse." He suggests these meganets possess two fundamental characteristics: they are "semiautonomous systems" that often elude the control of their creators (think Mark Zuckerberg struggling to inhibit vaccine misinformation on Facebook), and they are "feedback driven" (think Amazon suggesting products based on past purchases, strongly influencing future purchases in a way traditional advertising cannot). Case studies illustrate the ways in which well-intentioned data systems can produce unintended outcomes; for example, India's Aadhaar system distributes identification cards for citizens to access government services, but several deaths have been linked to the database after people not found in it were denied rations or medical care. The author's proposals for "taming the meganet" are provocative and include changing social media algorithms so users see more content beyond their usual interests and temporarily deranking popular posts to slow their spread. Auerbach's elucidation of how meganets have threatened equity and autonomy is perceptive and searing, and the unorthodox recommendations bring novel insights, even if they're largely focused on social media. This has some refreshing ideas on how to develop a fairer, saner online discourse.