How to repair the disconnect between designers and users,
producers and consumers, and tech elites and the rest of us: toward a
more democratic internet.
In
this provocative book, Ramesh Srinivasan describes the internet as
both an enabler of frictionless efficiency and a dirty tangle of
politics, economics, and other inefficient, inharmonious human
activities. We may love the immediacy of Google search results, the
convenience of buying from Amazon, and the elegance and power of our
Apple devices, but it's a one-way, top-down process. We're not asked
for our input, or our opinions—only for our data. The internet is
brought to us by wealthy technologists in Silicon Valley and China.
It's time, Srinivasan argues, that we think in terms beyond the
Valley.
Srinivasan
focuses on the disconnection he sees between designers and users,
producers and consumers, and tech elites and the rest of us. The
recent Cambridge Analytica and Russian misinformation scandals
exemplify the imbalance of a digital world that puts profits before
inclusivity and democracy. In search of a more democratic internet,
Srinivasan takes us to the mountains of Oaxaca, East and West Africa,
China, Scandinavia, North America, and elsewhere, visiting the
“design labs” of rural, low-income, and indigenous people around
the world. He talks to a range of high-profile public
figures—including Elizabeth Warren, David Axelrod, Eric Holder,
Noam Chomsky, Lawrence Lessig, and the founders of Reddit, as well as
community organizers, labor leaders, and human rights activists.. To
make a better internet, Srinivasan says, we need a new ethic of
diversity, openness, and inclusivity, empowering those now excluded
from decisions about how technologies are designed, who profits from
them, and who are surveilled and exploited by them.