Description

How the autonomousdigital forces jolting our lives as uncontrollable as the weather and plate tectonics are transforming life society culture and politics

David Auerbachs 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 Chinas Social Credit System and Indias Aadhaar

As we increasingly integrate our society culture and politics within a hypernetworked fabric Auerbach explains how the interactions of billions of people with unfathomably large online networks have produced a new sort of beast everchanging 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 And 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

Auerbachs analysis of these gargantuan opaque digital forces yield important insights such as

• The conventional wisdom that the Googles and Facebook of this world are tightly run algorithmic entities is a myth No one is really in control
• The efforts at reform to get lies and misinformation off meganets run into a brick wall because the companies and executives who run them are trapped by the persistent evolving and opaque systems they have created
• Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are uncontrollable and their embrace by elite financial institutions threatens the entire economy
• We are asking the wrong questions in assuming that if only the Facebooks of this world could be better regulated or broken up that they would be better more ethical citizens
• Why questions such as making algorithms fair and biasfree and whether AI can be a tool for good or evil are wrong and misinformed

Auerbach then comes full circle showing that while we cannot ultimately control meganets we can tame them through the counterintuitive measures he describes in detail