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How to fix the future / Andrew Keen.

by Keen, Andrew, author.

New York : Atlantic Monthly Press, 2018.

xiii, 330 pages ; 24 cm

First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition.

Preface: An internet of people -- Introduction: We've been here before -- More's Law -- Five tools for fixing the future -- What is broken -- Utopia: a case study (book one) -- Utopia: a case study (book two) -- Regulation -- Competitive innovation -- Social responsibility -- Worker and consumer choice -- Education -- Conclusion: Our kids.

A leading Internet commentator showcases global solutions for preserving the fundamentals of humanity and civilized society in an increasingly perilous digital world.

"Humanity has in the past undergone periods of creative destruction where improvements of social and economic conditions have come with harmful side effects. But, as Keen points out, we have ways to fix the problems we are facing now. He identifies five key tools: competitive innovation, consumer choice, regulation, social responsibility, and education. Keen travels the world to see how experts, innovators, and entrepreneurs are using these tools to make positive change. Keen's journey takes him to Estonia, where an online portal has been developed to allow Estonians to see the data collected on them by the government, and Where an "e-residency" program is projected to bring 10 million e-citizens to the small Baltic state by 2025. Keen travels to Germany, where both regulation and competitive innovation are being used to address problems: Hamburg's data commissioner successfully blocked Facebook from collecting data on the country's users of WhatsApp, and developers of software such as Adblock Plus are helping ensure that advertising does not become the sole raison d'?etre for the Internet. In India, Keen speaks to a young entrepreneur who is building a new data ID system as part of the government's "Rebooting India" program--quite a task in a country of 1.3 billion people. And Keen of course travels to Silicon Valley, where he finds a growing understanding that the pioneering tech entrepreneurs who have harvested unimaginable wealth from their innovations must become better citizens and help solve some of the problems they have created in the same way a previous generation of philanthropists--the Mellons, Carnegies, and Rockefellers--did. Powerful, urgent, and deeply engaging, How to Fix the Future shows how we might preserve human values in an increasingly digital world and the steps we must take as societies and individuals to make the future something we can again look forward to."--Jacket.

Humanity has in the past undergone periods of creative destruction where improvements of social and economic conditions have come with harmful side effects. Keen identified five key tools: competitive innovation, consumer choice, regulation, social responsibility, and education, and then traveled the world to see how data commissioners, software developers, entrepreneurs and more are using these tools to make positive change. In an increasingly digital world, we must take steps to make the future something we can again look forward to.

Former Internet entrepreneur Andrew Keen was among the earliest to write about the dangers that the Internet poses to our culture and society. His 2007 bookThe Cult of the Amateur was critical in helping advance the conversation around the Internet, which has now morphed from a tool providing efficiencies and opportunities for consumers and business to an elemental force that is profoundly reshaping our societies and our world. In his new book,How to Fix the Future, Keen focuses on what we can do about this seemingly intractable situation. Looking to the past to learn how we might change our future, he describes how societies tamed the excesses of the Industrial Revolution, which, like its digital counterpart, demolished long-standing models of living, ruined harmonious environments, and altered the business world beyond recognition. Traveling the world to interview experts in a wide variety of fields, from EU Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager, whose recent e2.4 billion fine to Google made headlines around the world, to successful venture capitalists who nonetheless see the tide turning, to CEOs of companies including The New York Times, Keen unearths approaches to tackling our digital future. There are five key tools that Keen identifies: regulation, competitive innovation, social responsibility, worker and consumer choice, and education. His journey to discover how these tools are being put into practice around the globe takes him from digital-oriented Estonia, where Skype was founded and where every citizen can access whatever data the government holds on them by logging in to an online database, and where a "e-residency" program allows the country to expand beyond its narrow borders, to Singapore, where a large part of the higher education sector consists in professional courses in coding and website design, to India, Germany, China, Russia, and, of course, Silicon Valley. Powerful, urgent, and deeply engaging,How to Fix the Future vividly depicts what we must do if we are to try to preserve human values in an increasingly digital world and what steps we might take as societies and individuals to make the future something we can again look forward to.

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