An interesting book, I learn some very unsavory details about the FANG companies, mission accomplished. I challenge some details in the first chapter. The author seems to say that shoe companies put GPS trackers in (all) of their shoes. As an IoT engineer who struggled with power constraints for a tiny device with GPS tracking, I am wondering where the shoe companies are getting the magical batteries to run these GPS trackers, and the connectivity to get the data back to the mothership. The shoe companies probably do some short-term tracking of elite customers, but I really don't think they are logging every footstrike of every customer.

I read this book in hard copy. I suspect it is a better read as an audio book. The author would have gotten an F from my grammar teachers, she is fond of overlong sentences. Seventy three words in one sentence. I counted.

The author has plainly exposed the broken promise of Google's mission statement, and the very duplicitous behavior of Facebook in particular. She does a good job showing how marketizing our data is not fair.

I just wish the book was much more succint, and shorter, with better fact checking. ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3716058.html

A very thought-provoking book by Financial Times / CNN correspondent Foroohar, which unfortunately I can't really write much about for professional reasons. ( )

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles - And All of Us by Rana Foroohar is a well researched assessment of the many ways big tech has helped to dismantle the very fabric of society at large and the US democracy in particular. Their ideals went out the window just as soon as they realized the amount of money and power they could wield, and they make no excuses for it, they are still, as of March 2020, doing all they can to spread disinformation while profiting off of all of the data they collect. So, too late, they are evil.

If anyone claims this book is over the top or hyperbolic, ignore them. My statements above are far more extreme and hyperbolic, though definitely accurate, than anything in Foroohar's book. She presents the evidence in a clear and thoughtful manner, supported by 25 pages of end notes and a substantial bibliography, as well as her years of experience.

The basic premise of the book, that these companies have, and continue to, disrupt and destroy community and democracy, are pretty widely acknowledged, even though some people are fine with it and prove that by pretending that it isn't happening. Oh well, hope that Kool-Aid tasted good. What Foroohar shows is the scope of the unethical practices and the depth of the lack of concern or compassion for the majority of humankind that these little techies have. They believe themselves to actually be deserving of lording over us, and when we do put an end to their reign, it will be a long and, I hope, painful fall. Ideally with adjoining jail cells with the Trumpenfuehrer clan.

While this book is data and research driven I also read a memoir along with it. Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener is a firsthand memoir about her time in the hellhole that is Silicon Valley, with the bro culture and the self-righteous trampling of individuals and democracy. These two books together offer a nice well-rounded view of the inbred culture of big tech.

Reviewed from a copy made available through Goodreads First Reads. ( )

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles - And All of Us by Rana Foroohar is a well researched assessment of the many ways big tech has helped to dismantle the very fabric of society at large and the US democracy in particular. Their ideals went out the window just as soon as they realized the amount of money and power they could wield, and they make no excuses for it, they are still, as of March 2020, doing all they can to spread disinformation while profiting off of all of the data they collect. So, too late, they are evil.

If anyone claims this book is over the top or hyperbolic, ignore them. My statements above are far more extreme and hyperbolic, though definitely accurate, than anything in Foroohar's book. She presents the evidence in a clear and thoughtful manner, supported by 25 pages of end notes and a substantial bibliography, as well as her years of experience.

The basic premise of the book, that these companies have, and continue to, disrupt and destroy community and democracy, are pretty widely acknowledged, even though some people are fine with it and prove that by pretending that it isn't happening. Oh well, hope that Kool-Aid tasted good. What Foroohar shows is the scope of the unethical practices and the depth of the lack of concern or compassion for the majority of humankind that these little techies have. They believe themselves to actually be deserving of lording over us, and when we do put an end to their reign, it will be a long and, I hope, painful fall. Ideally with adjoining jail cells with the Trumpenfuehrer clan.

While this book is data and research driven I also read a memoir along with it. Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener is a firsthand memoir about her time in the hellhole that is Silicon Valley, with the bro culture and the self-righteous trampling of individuals and democracy. These two books together offer a nice well-rounded view of the inbred culture of big tech.

Reviewed from a copy made available through Goodreads First Reads. ( )

"The history of technology is the history of transformation. And no transformation is ever complete." This author, who covered the global financial collapse in an earlier book, tells us that the FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) corporations that control so much of our daily lives are also too big to fail, and mostly too destructive to be unrestrained any longer. She makes her case with a series of chapters on advertising, the ruination of decent jobs by Uberization, the lobbying and extraordinary influence over Congress and Obama ("Google was Obama's Halliburton"), the selling of phone apps to children, US vs China internet governance, and the squelching of small and mid-size innovative companies laid to waste by the dominance of the FAANGs. It's scary, but Fooroohar offers some sensible but mostly unlikely remedies in her last chapter. Well-written, especially for those readers who are not big tech followers. ( )