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Book

Meganets : how digital forces beyond our control commandeer our daily lives and inner realities

Call Number

  • 004.678 A917 (MBL)

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Edition

First edition.

Publication Information

New York : PublicAffairs, 2023.

Physical Description

vii, 339 pages ; 25 cm

Summary

"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. 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"--

Contents

  • The new minds of the world
  • A world too big to know
  • No center to hold
  • Discovering the meganet
  • The meganet as game and commerce
  • Majority rules
  • The limits of control
  • Inside the meganet's brain
  • Taming the meganet
  • Gracefully passing the torch.

Subjects