Our Biggest Fight
Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age
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3.6 • 5개의 평가
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The internet as we know it is broken. Here’s how we can seize back control of our lives from the corporate algorithms and create a better internet—before it’s too late.
“In the spirit of Thomas Paine’s Revolution-era Common Sense, this manifesto challenges us to create new digital architectures to safeguard democracy.”—Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Elon Musk
It was once a utopian dream. But today’s internet, despite its conveniences and connectivity, is the primary cause of a pervasive unease that has taken hold in the U.S. and other democratic societies. It’s why youth suicide rates are rising, why politics has become toxic, and why our most important institutions are faltering.
Information is the lifeblood of any society, and our current system for distributing it is corrupted at its heart. Everything comes down to our ability to communicate openly and trustfully with each other. But, thanks to the dominant digital platforms and the ways they distort human behavior, we have lost that ability—while, at the same time, we’ve been robbed of the data that is rightfully ours.
The roots of this crisis, argue Frank McCourt and Michael Casey, lie in the prevailing order of the internet. In plain but forceful language, the authors—a civic entrepreneur and an acclaimed journalist—show how a centralized system controlled by a small group of for-profit entities has set this catastrophe in motion and eroded our personhood.
And then they describe a groundbreaking solution to reclaim it: rather than superficial, patchwork regulations, we must reimagine the very architecture of the internet. The resulting “third-generation internet” would replace the status quo with a new model marked by digital property rights, autonomy, and ownership.
Inspired by historical calls to action like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, Our Biggest Fight argues that we must act now to embed the core values of a free, democratic society in the internet of tomorrow. Do it right and we will finally, properly, unlock its immense potential.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McCourt, executive chairman of the McCourt Global asset management firm, debuts with a run-of-the-mill plea to transform humanity's relationship with technology. "The internet... is the primary cause of a pervasive unease in the United States," McCourt contends, citing the usual misdeeds covered in countless Big Tech takedowns. He argues that cyberbullying lies behind a spike in suicides among people under 24 and that Facebook's practice of garnering clicks by presenting users with content they're likely to disagree with has driven political polarization. The solution, he asserts, lies in implementing a new internet protocol that would give users control over their personal data and allow them to withhold it from websites. The proposal is a somewhat novel spin on the Web3 vision of a decentralized internet, but it's undercut by bombastic prose (at one point, McCourt urges readers to undertake the issue of data privacy "with the spirit of the American revolutionaries in 1776"). It's also not clear that stricter control over personal data would be the panacea McCourt portrays it to be. For instance, it remains foggy how data privacy would lead to a "prosocial internet in which we are incentivized to develop useful connections and engage in healthy, collaborative interactions." Readers drawn to the topic would be better off with Byron Tau's Means of Control.
