The Tangled Web We Weave
Inside The Shadow System That Shapes the Internet
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
We all see what the internet does and increasingly don't like it, but do we know how and more importantly who makes it work that way? That's where the real power lays...
The internet was supposed to be a thing of revolutions. As that dream curdles, there is no shortage of villains to blame--from tech giants to Russian bot farms. But what if the problem is not an issue of bad actors ruining a good thing? What if the hazards of the internet are built into the system itself?
That's what journalist James Ball argues as he takes us to the root of the problem, from the very establishment of the internet's earliest protocols to the cables that wire it together. He shows us how the seemingly abstract and pervasive phenomenon is built on a very real set of materials and rules that are owned, financed, designed and regulated by very real people.
In this urgent and necessary book, Ball reveals that the internet is not a neutral force but a massive infrastructure that reflects the society that created it. And making it work for--and not against--us must be an endeavor of the people as well.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Ball (Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World) examines "the architecture of the internet who built it, who governs it, how it works, and who owns it" in this knowledgeable yet lackluster account. Ball's familiar history of the internet, from its beginnings as a collaboration between research universities and the U.S. Department of Defense to the advent of programmatic advertising, features interviews with "power brokers" including Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, former Comcast public relations executive Frank Eliason, venture capitalist John Borthwick, and former FCC chairman Tom Wheeler. Though Ball notes that the people who have shaped the internet are "overwhelmingly Western and overwhelmingly male," he only brushes on the ramifications of that fact, and allows his interview subjects to hype their achievements without providing much fact-checking. Ball lucidly explains the mechanics of networks, servers, and programmatic advertising, but blames media companies for "hastening their demise by participating in the data-driven ad world" without fully acknowledging the lack of choices they have. Skeptical of government intervention, he favors small policy changes such as "new contracts and worker protections" for tech industry employees and "requir algorithms to be independently tested and vetted for systemic inequality or biases." This would-be expos misses the mark.
