Category Archives: Books

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe

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Excerpts from Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee.

Imagine a stew of unregulated capitalism, addictive technology, and authoritarian values, combined with Silicon Valley’s relentlessness and hubris, unleashed on billions of unsuspecting users.

The most likely case is that the technology and business model of Facebook and others will continue to undermine democracy, public health, privacy, and innovation until a countervailing power, in the form of government intervention or user protest, forces change.

Surveillance, the sharing of user data, and behavioral modification are the foundation of Facebook’s success.

When users are riled up, they consume and share more content. Dispassionate users have relatively little value to Facebook.

Facebook is the fourth most valuable company in America, despite being only fifteen years old, and its value stems from its mastery of surveillance and behavioral modification.

It turns out that connecting 2.2 billion people on a single network does not naturally produce happiness for all. It puts pressure on users, first to present a desirable image, then to command attention in the form of Likes or shares from others. In such an environment, the loudest voices dominate, which can be intimidating. As a result, we follow the human instinct to organize ourselves into clusters or tribes.

The competition for attention across the media and technology spectrum rewards the worst social behavior. Extreme views attract more attention, so platforms recommend them.

Research suggests that people who accept one conspiracy theory have a high likelihood of accepting a second one.

Belonging is stronger than facts.

The Russians might have invented a new kind of warfare, one perfectly suited to a fading economic power looking to regain superpower status.

Technology tends to reflect the values of the people who create them.

When a company grows from nothing to 2.2 billion active users and forty billion dollars in revenues in only fourteen years, you can be sure of three things: First, the original idea was brilliant. Second, execution of the business plan had to be nearly flawless. And third, at some point along the way, the people who manage the company will lose perspective. If everything your company touches turns into gold for years on end, your executives will start to believe the good things people say about them. They will view their mission as exalted. They will reject criticism. They will ask, “If the critics are so smart, why aren’t they so successful and rich as we are?”

On Facebook, information and disinformation look the same; the only difference is that disinformation generates more revenue, so it gets much better treatment.

Huge amounts of data are available. Campaigns can buy a list of two hundred million voting-age Americans with fifteen hundred data points per person from a legitimate data broker for seventy-five thousand dollars.

Where Orwell worried about the burning of books, Huxley argued that the greater risk would be citizen no longer wanting to read.

Facebook is a threat to democracy.

Masters of the Word

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Financial historian William J. Bernstein explores how communication tools shaped human history. Among the book’s many narratives:

  • How the first writing systems in Mesopotamia and Egypt, because they were so complex, could be mastered by only a privileged elite who used this unique skill of literacy to assemble large, despotic city states and the world’s first empires.
  • How the development of progressively simpler alphabetic systems in the Eastern Mediterranean region allowed ever larger percentages of ordinary people to learn them. The final result, the Greek alphabet, could be grasped so easily that it fostered the dawn of democracy in Greece.
  • How Gutenberg actually changed the world. He didn’t invent movable type, and he certainly didn’t invent the printing press. The technology he developed, rather, was yet more subtle and powerful.
  • How the Reformation was not effected by Luther the fiery preacher and brilliant theologian, but rather by Luther the publisher.
  • How the fall of the Soviet Union resulted, in large part, from a colossal error in radio production.
  • How the Internet isn’t destroying our children’s academic performance, rewiring our brains, making us stupid, destroying investigative journalism, and won’t produce democracy in the Arab world, but will  likely make genocide less frequent.

Below are some excerpts from the book: Continue reading →

Team Human

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Excerpts from Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff.

There’s a reason for our current predicament: an anti-human agenda embedded in our technology, our markets, and our major cultural institutions, from education and religion to civics and media.

Thinking, feeling, connected people undermine the institutions that would control them. […] Our institutions and technologies aren’t designed to extend our human nature, but to mitigate and repress it.

It doesn’t take much to tilt a healthy social landscape toward an individualist or repressive one. A scarcity of resources, a hostile neighboring tribe, a warlord looking for power, and elite seeking to maintain its authority, or a corporation pursuing a monopoly all foster antisocial environments and behaviors. Continue reading →

Land Rover book

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“When the original Land Rover had been drawn up, there had been no proper styling team at Solihull. The appearance of the vehicle had been dictated partly by its intended function and partly by manufacturing requirements, and nobody had worried too much about what it looked like. This was, after all, a commercial vehicle and buyers were unlikely to set too much store by aesthetics as long as it did the intended job.”

— Land Rover: 65 Years of the 4 x 4 Workhorse by James Taylor (Amazon)

I received this as a Christmas gift. I don’t know if you would have to own and drive one of these old trucks to appreciate the Land Rover story. Maybe. Packed with history.

AI Superpowers

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“In his book “AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order,” Kai-Fu Lee, a well-known artificial-intelligence expert, venture capitalist and former president of Google China, argues that China and Silicon Valley will lead the world in AI. But his highly readable book covers a lot of other ground as well, and among the most interesting insights are his descriptions of the differences between Chinese and Silicon Valley tech culture.” (Washington Post review) Not quite finished but here are some excerpts:

If artificial intelligence is the new electricity, Chinese entrepreneurs will be the tycoons and tinkerers who electrify everything from household appliances to homeowners’ insurance. […] Ambitious mayors across China are scrambling to turn their cities into showcases for new AI applications. They’re plotting driverless trucking routes, installing facial recognition systems on public transportation, and hooking traffic grids into “city brains” that optimize flows.

China’s startup culture is the yin to Silicon Valley’s yang: instead of being mission-driven, Chinese companies are first and foremost market-driven. Their ultimate goal is to make money, and they’re willing to create any product, adopt any model, or go into any business that will accomplish that objective. […] The core motivation for China’s market-driven entrepreneurs is not fame, glory, or changing the world. Those things are all nice side benefits, but the grand prize is getting rich, and it doesn’t matter how you get there.

Adoption of mobile payments happened at lightning speed. By the end of 2016, it was hard to find a shop in a major (Chinese) city that did not accept mobile payments. […] By the end of 2017, 65 percent of China’s over 753 million smartphone users had enabled mobile payments. […] It got to the point where beggars on the streets of Chinese cities began hanging pieces of paper around their necks with printouts of two QR codes, one for Alipay and one for WeChat. […]

For 2017, total transactions on China’s mobile payment platforms reportedly surpassed $ 17 trillion—greater than China’s GDP. […] Data from mobile payments is currently generating the richest maps of consumer activity the world has ever known, far exceeding the data from traditional credit-card purchases or online activity captured by e-commerce players like Amazon or platforms like Google and Yelp. […] Recent estimates have Chinese companies outstripping U.S. competitors ten to one in quantity of food deliveries and fifty to one in spending on mobile payments. China’s e-commerce purchases are roughly double the U.S. totals, and the gap is only growing.

U.S. federal funding for math and computer science research amounts to less than half of Google’s own R& D budget.

Between 2007 and 2017, China went from having zero high-speed rail lines to having more miles of high-speed rail operational than the rest of the world combined.

It no longer makes sense to think of oneself as “going online.” When you order a full meal just by speaking a sentence from your couch, are you online or offline? When your refrigerator at home tells your shopping cart at the store that you’re out of milk, are you moving through a physical world or a digital one?In the United States we build self-driving cars to adapt to our existing roads because we assume the roads can’t change. In China, there’s a sense that everything can change—including current roads. Indeed, local officials are already modifying existing highways, reorganizing freight patterns, and building cities that will be tailor-made for driverless cars.

Much of today’s white-collar workforce is paid to take in and process information, and then make a decision or recommendation based on that information—which is precisely what AI algorithms do best.

“A Ballad and Bosch Novel”

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Just finished the latest Harry Bosch novel (Dark Sacred Night) but but we really can’t call it that. Right there on the cover it says “A Ballad and Bosch Novel.” In 2017 author Michael Connelly introduced the character Renee Ballard in The Late Show and she gets equal billing with Harry in the new book.

In the previous novel (Two Kinds of Truth) Harry was getting on in years. 68 by my count. In this latest story, Renee does some of the more physical stuff it would be difficult to imagine someone Harry’s age doing. He must be getting close to the big seven-oh.

This seems like a real challenge for an author with a beloved character that’s been around for a lot of years. Lucas Davenport — the main guy in John Sanford’s Prey series — is getting on in years but Sandford gave us Virgil Flowers some years ago and he could bring Kidd out of mothballs. I try not to think about how old Lucas Davenport is for the same reason I don’t think about how old my dog is. I don’t want to know.

The late Sue Grafton froze Kinsey Millhone in the 80s but that ruled out tech like mobile phones and personal computers. I much prefer Connelly’s (and Sandford’s) approach: let the characters age. Teaming Renee and Harry in this new book worked for me. They make a good team.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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I’m not up to reviewing Yuval Noah Harari’s latest book (21 Lessons for the 21st Century) but I liked this one by The Guardian. I really liked his two previous books, Sapiens and Homo Deus, and you can read some of my favorite excerpts in previous posts. I’m doing the same below but first I’ll say this book made me questions some of my long held beliefs. Nationalism, Religion and Immigration, just to name a few. This is a good example of what I mean when I suggest you ditch Facebook and TV news and read a book.

“The Industrial Revolution has bequeathed us the production-line theory of education. In the middle of town there is a large concrete building divided into many identical rooms, each room equipped with rows of desks and chairs. At the sound of a bell, you go to one of these rooms together with thirty other kids who were all born the same year as you. Every hour a different grown-up walks in and starts talking. The grown-ups are all paid to do so by the government. One of them tells you about the shape of the earth, another tells you about the human past, and a third tells you about the human body.”

“If somebody describes the world of the mid-twenty-first century to you and it sounds like science fiction, it is probably false. But then again, if somebody describes the world of the mid-twenty-first century to you and it doesn’t sound like science fiction, it is certainly false.”

“When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion.” 

“As a species, humans prefer power to truth.”

“Trust in the dollar and in the wisdom of the Federal Reserve is so firm that it is shared even by Islamic fundamentalists, Mexican drug lords, and North Korean tyrants.”

“A priest is not somebody who knows how to perform the rain dance and end the drought. A priest is somebody who knows how to justify why the rain dance failed.”

“In 2016, despite wars in Syria, Ukraine, and several other hot spots, fewer people died from human violence than from obesity, car accidents, or suicide.”

““Once AI makes better decisions than we do about careers and perhaps even relationships, our concept of humanity and of life will have to change.“”

““Democracy in its present form cannot survive the merger of biotech and infotech. Either democracy will successfully reinvent itself in a radically new form or humans will come to live in “digital dictatorships.””

“In the twenty-first century data will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset, and politics will be a struggle to control the flow of data. If data becomes concentrated in too few hands, humankind will split into different species.”

“So in the twenty-first century religions don’t bring rain, they don’t cure illnesses, they don’t build bombs—but they do get to determine who are “us” and who are “them,” whom we should cure and whom we should bomb.”

“We think we know a lot, even though individually we know very little, because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own.”

“If you cannot afford to waste time, you will never find the truth.”

Sam Harris “conversation” with Yuval Noah Harari

The Passing Scene

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“Life is like looking out of the window while sitting in a train. You have no control over what appears in view. There’s even the moment after the train has paused, when it imperceptibly begins moving again. The appearance is that the train is motionless, but the scenery outside the window is moving. That, too, is a view that life sometimes gives us, a falsely relative view. We make no attempt to control the scene observed outside the train, knowing that wishing that it was something that it isn’t would be useless. And so it is, for the person who relaxes into Absolute awareness. Whatever passes across the screen of consciousness, whatever the organism experiences, is viewed dispassionately. The viewer acknowledges that all things change, and merely witnesses the changes impartially.”

— Abiding In Nondual Awareness (Robert Wolfe)

Suzuki Roshi on the inner experience of Zen: “The sights we see from the train will change, but we are always running on the same track. And there is no beginning or end to the track.”