4/5 stars
Impressively prescient, considering it was published five years ago but is about technology – something that’s been moving madly fast during that timeframe. The Facebook / Cambridge Analytica scandal effectively predicted, many of the debates still going on in business and government today about things like the gig economy, autonomous vehicles and more were anticipated and summarised before they’d really started happening. The impression is that Lanier had seen all this coming decades ago – and he probably did.
As such, lots here to spark thought, lots to be impressed with, and it’s hard to disagree with the central thesis that the informational economics of the internet age are fundamentally broken. But at the same time, the only alternative to the current way of doing things – micropayments for data exhange/generation – still seems insanely impractical, even employing a technology like blockchain (something similar to which Lanier kinda proposes here).
So while Lanier ends on an optimistic note, the book left me more pessimistic than ever about our tech-driven future.