"A valuable primer on this moment where humans are deciding how much power over their lives they give to monopolies and algorithms." —DAVE EGGERS, bestselling author of The Circle Which Side of History? offers a collection of bold essays on how technology is affecting democracy, society, and our future. Featuring prominent national voices such as Sacha Baron Cohen, Marc Benioff, Ellen Pao, Ken Auletta, Chelsea Clinton, Tim Wu, Khaled Hosseini, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Jaron Lanier, Willow Bay, Sal Khan, Sherry Turkle, Shoshana Zuboff, Vivek Murthy, Geoffrey Canada, and many more. The essays focus on the extraordinary impact of technology on our privacy, kids and families, race and gender roles, democracy, climate change, and mental health. This groundbreaking book challenges opinion leaders and the broader public to take action to improve technology's effects on our lives.• Featuring notable journalists, engineers, entrepreneurs, novelists, activists, filmmakers, business leaders, scholars, and researchers, including: Thomas Friedman, Kara Swisher, Michelle Alexander, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Jenna Wortham, Cameron Kasky, Howard Gardner, and Tristan Harris. • Explores the ethical behavior of Big Tech, or the lack thereof. • Offers roadmaps for constructive change and thought-provoking perspectives. With the rise of cyberbullying and hate speech online, issues around climate change and technology, and the "move fast and break things" mentality of tech culture, Which Side of History? will urge readers to draw the line. • This book will help shape the conversations we have around technology in our society and our future for years to come. • A smart book for anyone who approaches tech and the future with a healthy skepticism • Edited by James P. Steyer, the CEO and founder of Common Sense Media. • Add it to the shelf with books like Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr, and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, you can cancel anytime from the Subscription tab in your account settings on the Perlego website. Your subscription will stay active until the end of your current billing period. Learn how to cancel your subscription.
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
Perlego offers two plans: Essential and Complete
Essential is ideal for learners and professionals who enjoy exploring a wide range of subjects. Access the Essential Library with 800,000+ trusted titles and best-sellers across business, personal growth, and the humanities. Includes unlimited reading time and Standard Read Aloud voice.
Complete: Perfect for advanced learners and researchers needing full, unrestricted access. Unlock 1.4M+ books across hundreds of subjects, including academic and specialized titles. The Complete Plan also includes advanced features like Premium Read Aloud and Research Assistant.
Both plans are available with monthly, semester, or annual billing cycles.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes! You can use the Perlego app on both iOS or Android devices to read anytime, anywhere — even offline. Perfect for commutes or when you’re on the go. Please note we cannot support devices running on iOS 13 and Android 7 or earlier. Learn more about using the app.
Yes, you can access Which Side of History? by James P. Steyer in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Politics & International Relations & Public Policy. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Sacha Baron Cohen is a British actor, comedian, screenwriter, director, and film producer best known for fictional, satirical characters he has created and portrayed, including Ali G, Borat Sagdiyev, Brüno Gehard, and Admiral General Aladeen.
Some critics have said that my comedy, at times, risks reinforcing negative stereotypes. But the truth is, I’ve been passionate about challenging bigotry and intolerance throughout my life. As a teenager in the United Kingdom, I marched against the fascist National Front and to abolish apartheid. As an undergraduate, I traveled around America and wrote my thesis about the civil rights movement, with the help of the archives of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). And as a comedian, I’ve tried to use my characters to get people to let down their guard and reveal what they actually believe, including their own prejudices.
I admit, there was nothing particularly enlightening about me — as Borat from Kazakhstan, the first fake news journalist — running naked through a conference of mortgage brokers. But when Borat was able to get an entire bar in Arizona to sing “Throw the Jew down the well,” it did reveal people’s indifference to anti-Semitism. When — as Brüno, the gay fashion reporter from Austria — I started kissing a man in a cage fight in Arkansas, nearly starting a riot, it showed the violent potential of homophobia. And when — disguised as an ultrawoke developer — I proposed building a mosque in one rural community, prompting a resident to proudly admit, “I am racist, against Muslims,” it showed the acceptance of Islamophobia.
Today around the world, demagogues appeal to our worst instincts. Democracy, which depends on shared truths, is in retreat, and autocracy, which depends on shared lies, is on the march. Hate crimes are surging, as are murderous attacks on religious and ethnic minorities. All this hate and violence is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history.
Think about it. Facebook, YouTube, Google, Twitter, and others reach billions of people. The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify stories that appeal to our baser instincts and trigger outrage and fear. It’s why fake news outperforms real news — because studies show that lies spread faster than truth.
In their defense, these social media companies have taken some superficial steps to reduce hate and conspiracies on their platforms, but it’s time to finally call these companies what they really are — the largest publishers in history. They should abide by basic standards and practices just like newspapers, magazines, and TV news do every day.
Publishers can be sued for libel, people can be sued for defamation. I’ve been sued many times! But social media companies are largely protected from liability for the content their users post — no matter how indecent it is — by Section 230 of, get ready for it, the Communications Decency Act. Absurd!
People should not be targeted, harassed, and murdered because of who they are, where they come from, who they love, or how they pray. If we prioritize truth over lies, tolerance over prejudice, empathy over indifference, and experts over ignoramuses — then maybe we can stop the greatest propaganda machine in history, save democracy, and still protect free speech and free expression.
Be Paranoid
Kara Swisher
Kara Swisher is an editor-at-large at Recode and is a contributing opinion writer on technology for the New York Times.
Only the paranoid survive.
That was, of course, the motto made famous by Intel’s legendary founder and former chief executive, Andy Grove, who later turned the line into a book that was actually about being hypervigilant as inevitable “crisis points” occur at your company.
It’s still a good piece of advice, but these days it seems as though there is an entirely new way of reading that line when it comes to a different issue in tech: the surveillance economy that continues to spread like a virus worldwide, even as consumers are less aware than ever of its implications.
That includes me, who should know better. I have two-factor authentication. I cover my camera lens on my computer. I redo all my security settings regularly. I am wary of — you might even say mean about — various consumer abuses by giant social media companies, search behemoths, and testosterone-jacked e-commerce companies.
Still, as much as I know about tech, I’m often lazy and use its tools without care, even as each day seems to bring new headlines about privacy incursions sometimes done for commercial reasons, sometimes for malevolent ones, and sometimes just as a result of tech’s latest changes. Privacy has been losing badly, as users have become the online equivalent of cheap dates to these giant tech companies. We trade the lucrative digital essence of ourselves for much less in the form of free maps or nifty games or compelling communications apps.
We’re digitally sloppy, even if it can be very dangerous, as evidenced by a disturbing New York Times story about an Emirati secure messaging app called ToTok, which is used by millions across the Middle East and has also recently become one of the most downloaded in the United States.
The name was obviously used to place the app adjacent to the hugely popular TikTok, already under scrutiny by American officials because of its Chinese origins and possible link to the Beijing government. In the case of ToTok, according to the Times report, it turns out that it is a spy tool “used by the government of the United Arab Emirates to try to track every conversation, movement, relationship, appointment, sound, and image of those who install it on their phones.”
The app’s skein of developers is opaque, but apparently it is controlled by a sinister-sounding company linked to the Emirate government called DarkMatter. (Yes, that is actually its name, akin to calling the villain in a movie Mr. Really Bad Guy.)
After the Times inquiry, Google and Apple, US tech giants that are the prime distributors of apps worldwide, removed ToTok from their online stores. But the damage was done — and by the users themselves.
“You don’t need to hack people to spy on them if you can get people to willingly download this app to their phone,” said Patrick Wardle, who did a forensic analysis for the Times, in the report. “By uploading contacts, video chats, location, what more intelligence do you need?”
Indeed, anyone who wants to spy needs very little, as all of us continue availing ourselves of tech’s many wonders while promiscuously shedding our data.
That much was clear in the eye-opening investigation of smartphones by Times Opinion called “One Nation Tracked.” The Opinion report was even more dire than the ToTok story: One data set of twelve million phones with fifty billion location pings from a basic location-data company showed clearly that there is no such thing as privacy. At all. Ever. Not on the beaches of Southern California, not at the Pentagon, not at the White House.
“Now, as the decade ends, tens of millions of Americans, including many children, find themselves carrying spies in their pockets during the day and leaving them beside their beds at night — even though the corporations that control their data are far less accountable than the government would be,” noted the report, which included a look at how to track President Trump, the citizens of Pasadena, and protesters in Hong Kong, as well as how to try to stop it all. This is what freaked me out enough to go back and tighten the security on my own phone.
Yes, it’s up to us to protect ourselves, since there are no federal laws that actually do it. Europe has been far ahead on privacy with its 2016 General Data Protection Regulation (which was implemented in 2018), and things will finally start to change for Californians like me as the 2018 California Consumer Privacy Act goes into effect.
The law will bring some relief, since it will give citizens of the state more control over personal data: We will know what is being collected and where it is sold, and we will even have the right to ask for such data to be deleted. It also adds special protections for minors, prohibiting the sale of personal information of those under sixteen years old.
California’s law will become the de facto law of the land on privacy until the federal government acts, which is a long way from happening. Promises that bills will be rolled out in the House and Senate came and went in 2019.
The record so far is not encouraging. Which is why I’ll opt out of waiting and keep fending off my app stalkers by myself.
Our world, at the moment, feels very Yeats-y — things falling apart, the center not holding, anarchy loosed, drowned innocence, a lack of conviction from the best, and of course, endless loudmouthery from the worst.
But despair not because what’s coming in the next few years might be a lot better than you expect, especially now that our outsize expectations for tech have been leveled and fanboy tendencies toward technology companies have been tamped down.
We haven’t quite dealt with all of the repercussions of tech’s domination of the past decade — there will be regulations, a lot of tech is still addictive, and digital hate will continue to travel halfway around the world before the truth gets out of bed — but there are some big, positive ideas that I think you will hear a lot more about in the coming years.
There are opportunities to create new forms of communication that give the advantage to users — by strictly enforcing behavior standards and eliminating anonymity, and most of all, with advertising-based business plans that are not predicated on taking advantage of our personal data.
There is yet another opportunity here to push for design ethics, a movement that I think will gain traction as we all assess what our dives into digital have done to humanity. While our tech devices have, on the whole, been good for most people, there is a true business opportunity in making them work more efficiently and without a reliance on addiction. Whether we move toward more intuitively created tech that surrounds us or that incorporates into our bodies (yes, that’s coming), I am going to predict that carrying around a device in our hand and staring at it will be a thing of the past by 2030. Like the electrical grid we rely on daily, most tech will become invisible.
That’s right, I am calling it now: There will be an internet in the future that stops screaming at us.
Only the paranoid survive, for sure, but so do the patient.
From the New York Times.
The Known Unknown
Shoshana Zuboff
Shoshana Zuboff is the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and is professor emerita at Harvard Business School.
The debate on privacy and law at the Federal Trade Commission was unusually heated that day. Tech industry executives “argued that they were capable of regulating themselves and that government intervention would be costly and counterproductive.” Civil libertarians warned that the companies’ data capabilities posed “an unprecedented threat to individual freedom.” One observed, “We have to decide what human beings are in the electronic age. Are we just going to be chattel for commerce?” A commissioner asked, “Where should we draw the line?” The year was 1997.
The line was never drawn, and the executives got their way. Twenty-three years later the evidence is in. The fruit of that victory was a new economic logic that I call “surveillance capitalism.” Its success depends upon one-way-mirror operations engineered for our ignorance and wrapped in a fog of misdirection, euphemism, and mendacity. It rooted and flourished in the new spaces of the internet, once celebrated by surveillance capitalists as “the world’s largest ungoverned space.” But power fills a void, and those once-wild spaces are no longer ungoverned. Instead, they are owned and operated by private surveillance capital and governed by its iron laws.
The rise of surveillance capitalism over the last two decades went largely unchallenged. “Digital” was fast, we were told, and stragglers would be left behind. It’s not surprising that so many of us rushed to follow the bustling White Rabbit down his tunnel into a promised digital Wonderland where, like Alice, we fell prey to delusion. In Wonderland, we celebrated the new digital services as free, but now we see that the surveillance capitalists behind those services regard us as the free commodity. We thought that we were searching Google, but now we understand that Google searches us. We assumed that we were using social media to connect, but we have learned that connection is how social media uses us. We barely questioned why our new TV or mattress had a privacy policy, but we’ve begun to understand that “privacy” policies are actually surveillance policies.
Like our forebears who called the automobile a “horseless carriage” because they could not reckon with its true dimension, we regarded the internet platforms as “bulletin boards” where anyone could pin a note. Congress cemented this delusion in a statute, Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, giving those companies immunity from liability and absolving them of the obligations that adhere to “publishers” or even to “speakers.”
Only repeated crises have taught us that these platforms are not bulletin boards but hypervelocity global bloodstreams into which anyone may introduce a dangerous virus without a vaccine. This is how Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, could legally refuse to remove a faked video of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and later double down on this decision, announcing that political advertising would not be subject to fact-checking.
All of these delusions rest on the most treacherous hallucination of them all: the belief that privacy is private. We have imagined that we can choose our degree of privacy with an individual calculation in which a bit of personal information is traded for valued services — a reasonable quid pro quo. For example, when Delta Air Lines piloted a biometric data system at the Atlanta airport, the company reported that of nearly twenty-five thousand customers who traveled there each week, 98 percent opted into the process, noting that “the facial recognition option is saving an average of two seconds for each customer at boarding, or nine minutes when boarding a wide-bod...
