“Just a word. Are you listening?” Mr. Maguire told Ben Braddock in “The Graduate” (1967). “Plastic.”
Twenty-five years later, I was warned by a mischievous trumpet player, a literature major who didn’t yet have an email address, that the future lay in something called “hyperlinks.”
Now here comes David B. Auerbach with a new piece of slang and a book, for our rapidly changing times: “Meganets.” It’s a powerful-sounding term that some companies, including one communications provider and sprinkler systemThey have already claimed. (I discovered this, naturally, at Google, which along with Microsoft once employed Auerbach as software engineer.) But your definition of a “meganet” is, in essence, a great mass of deadly and computational power, a “giant human-machine” controlled by no one. If the Internet is the fictional doctor and scientist Bruce Banner, sneaky and slightly troublesome but basically benign, the mega-nets are Incredible Hulks, snarling and unstoppable.
On the competing concept of the metaverse, the vision of an imminent, invertible digital world that has been on everyone’s lips, but especially Mark Zuckerberg, Auerbach is a bit wavy, calling it “terribly vague.” And also nothing so new. “Don’t we already socialize, play and work in an overly immersive online world?” he he writes he. “That world may not be ‘The Matrix,’ but all the connective tissue is already there.”
Along with all the literature about “unplugging” or learning “How to Do Nothing,” as Jenny Odell titled her flower-bedecked 2019 bestseller, “Meganets” made me deeply queasy from the amount of time I spend on Instagram, Reddit, TikTok and Twitter. not Facebook, never Facebook, “a source of disinformation,” as Auerbach calls it, “a petri dish in which false facts and crazy theories grow, mutate, and metastasize,” except for the burner account I occasionally use to see what’s going on. doing the ex
When my little “private” Instagram account was hacked last year by an entrepreneurial bitcoin entrepreneur in a faraway land, I panicked, especially after an unnamed entity on Insta requested and later refused a series of on-camera video selfies. slow. , tilting my head towards the ceiling even, to verify my account.
Was this the experience of a validation addict going through withdrawal? No, let’s rephrase: I was trapped in a meganet (especially now that Facebook’s parent company Meta owns Insta): a middle-aged mermaid fluttering in the great online ocean while data floated around me, multiplying like plankton. .
A Gen Xer could also feel at sea in Auerbach’s lengthy chapter on cryptocurrency. “Reality bites”, we naively think, but here “reality bifurcates”, with the blockchain folding back on itself like a caterpillar.
Auerbach is as comfortable with literature and philosophy as he is with the engine room, quoting Kenneth Burke, George Trow and Shakespeare (in a discussion of the inability of artificial intelligence to determine authorship of the Elizabethan play “Arden of Faversham”). ”). “I have waited more than five years for Amazon to notify me of an available copy of Grigol Robakidze’s novel ‘Serpent’s Skin,’” he writes, “supposedly published in 2015.” This would be a reissue of a 1928 Georgian modernist classic that sounds fascinating — “but I will never get that notification because the Amazon page for the book is actually a tombstone for a book that never existed.”
According to his previous memoir, “Bitwise,” Auerbach first gave America the ability to write smiley faces in chat. If he were responding to “Meganets” like that, it would be with 😐, which can obscure an intermittent lack of understanding. This is a deeply interesting book, but for the average “user,” which is what meganets have made of readers and writers, one is sometimes difficult to access. It was fascinating to recall the failed Google+ experiment (remember?), the search index response to Facebook, and more about Aadhaar, India’s national ID program: “a unified, government-sanctioned megagrid,” Auerbach writes. A “Data Abundance” graph showing how many messages are sent and photos are shared across various platforms every minute depicts the new intertwining of life with unsettling precision.
But trying to follow Auerbach’s description of a virtual pandemic called Corrupted Blood that spread through the World of Warcraft video game in 2005, arguing that “the distance between Corrupted Blood and a global financial collapse is smaller than you might think,” this “user” I felt trapped in a dark rec room with a hoodie over my face. It was like trying to solve CAPTCHA with different types of obscure motor vehicles. (Why never flowers?)
“Cloud” is a term that Auerbach finds just as nebulous as “metaverse,” and yet his own text is rather clouded, though it’s worth the trip for the occasional leaps to see the horizon; the lightning bolts of his own philosophical intuition.
“We look for where the power really is, when it is nowhere, or everywhere at once, which is no more useful.”
“If you don’t give people what they want, what do you give them?” (“What they never knew they wanted,” Diana Vreeland would reply).
And, in a biblical-sounding proposal to mitigate this Orwellian inferno: “If Big Brother can’t be stopped, we should concentrate on throwing sand in his eyes instead of futilely trying to kill him.”
Take my Wi-Fi, please!
MEGANETS: How digital forces beyond our control dominate our daily lives and our inner realities, by David B. Auerbach | Public Affairs | 339 pp. | $30
