The author, born in New York in 1960, is an expert in computers, business and music. He came up with the concept of virtual reality, teaches in Berkeley California and works for Microsoft. He reproaches big enterprises for collecting information from their users in their computing centres, not paying for the information and then selling it as big data. Business empires such as Google and Facebook, while supposedly offering their users free service, collect information on them. Other businesses such as Amazon and similar online selling companies store and exploit user information. The central idea of the book is: in the Internet consortia you are a product not a client. He complains that the current structure of the internet takes away the livelihood of middle class professionals. (He gives the example of musicians who are ruined by their music being sold or downloaded on the net).
He castigates the asymmetry of information on the net. The data centre know the individuals whose data they are using but those individuals do not know how their data is being used or by who. He advocates for information in both senses, where the individual knows where his data is going and is paid for what is provided. His ideas on religion are superficial. In the chapter on the wise old man in the clouds he maintains that we serve our fellow men best when we keep our religious ideas separate from our work. Later on he criticises the illusionary belief that technology will create immortality, either by eliminating death or by keeping alive a virtual personality by feeding it with the person’s data. He argues that death is a way of renewing life and allows creativity. From the moral point of view the book could be confusing.
F.B. (Germany, 2016)