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Meganets
- How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 12 hrs and 2 mins
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Publisher's summary
How the autonomous digital forces jolting our lives—as uncontrollable as the weather and plate tectonics—are transforming life, society, culture, and politics.
David Auerbach’s exploration of the phenomenon he has identified as the meganet begins with a simple, startling revelation: There is no hand on the tiller of some of the largest global digital forces that influence our daily lives: from corporate sites such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, YouTube, Instagram, and Reddit to the burgeoning metaverse encompassing cryptocurrencies and online gaming to government systems such as China’s Social Credit System and India’s Aadhaar.
As we increasingly integrate our society, culture and politics within a hyper-networked fabric, Auerbach explains how the interactions of billions of people with unfathomably large online networks have produced a new sort of beast: ever-changing systems that operate beyond the control of the individuals, companies, and governments that created them.
Meganets, Auerbach explains, have a life of their own, actively resisting attempts to control them as they accumulate data and produce spontaneous, unexpected social groups and uprisings that could not have even existed twenty years ago. And they constantly modify themselves in response to user behavior, resulting in collectively authored algorithms none of us intend or control. These enormous invisible organisms exerting great force on our lives are the new minds of the world, increasingly commandeering our daily lives and inner realities.
Auerbach’s analysis of these gargantuan opaque digital forces yield important insights such as:
- The conventional wisdom that the Googles and Facebook of this world are tightly run algorithmic entities is a myth. No one is really in control.
- The efforts at reform—to get lies and misinformation off meganets—run into a brick wall because the companies and executives who run them are trapped by the persistent, evolving, and opaque systems they have created.
- Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are uncontrollable and their embrace by elite financial institutions threatens the entire economy
- We are asking the wrong questions in assuming that if only the Facebooks of this world could be better regulated or broken up that they would be better, more ethical citizens.
- Why questions such as making algorithms fair and bias-free and whether AI can be a tool for good or evil are wrong and misinformed
Auerbach then comes full circle, showing that while we cannot ultimately control meganets we can tame them through the counterintuitive measures he describes in detail.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
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By: Nicholas L. Johnson, and others
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The Filter Bubble
- What the Internet Is Hiding from You
- By: Eli Pariser
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 7 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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In December 2009, Google began customizing its search results for each user. Instead of giving you the most broadly popular result, Google now tries to predict what you are most likely to click on. According to MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser, Google's change in policy is symptomatic of the most significant shift to take place on the Web in recent years: the rise of personalization.
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Now in the top 3 best books I've ever read
- By Brian Esserlieu on 05-26-11
By: Eli Pariser
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Who Controls the Internet
- Illusions of a Borderless World
- By: Jack Goldsmith, Tim Wu
- Narrated by: Bob Loza
- Length: 6 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Is the Internet erasing national borders? Who's really in control of what's happening on the Net--Internet engineers, rogue programmers, the United Nations, or powerful countries?In this provocative new book, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu tell the fascinating story of the Internet's challenge to governmental rule in the 1990s, and the ensuing battles with governments around the world.
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Mostly delves into questions of law
- By Amazon Customer on 05-07-11
By: Jack Goldsmith, and others
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AI Superpowers
- China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order
- By: Kai-Fu Lee
- Narrated by: Mikael Naramore
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In AI Superpowers, Kai-fu Lee argues powerfully that because of these unprecedented developments in AI, dramatic changes will be happening much sooner than many of us expected. Indeed, as the US-Sino AI competition begins to heat up, Lee urges the US and China to both accept and to embrace the great responsibilities that come with significant technological power.
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Compelled to listen at 2x speed
- By LEE on 09-26-18
By: Kai-Fu Lee
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Little Rice
- Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream
- By: Clay Shirky
- Narrated by: George Backman
- Length: 3 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Since the 1990s China has been climbing up the ladder of quality, from doing knockoffs to designing its own high-end goods. Xiaomi - its name literally means "little rice" - is landing squarely in this shift in China's economy. But the remarkable rise of Xiaomi from startup to colossus is more than a business story because mobile phones are special. The common desiderata of the global population, mobile phones offer the kind of freedom and connectedness that autocratic countries are terrified of.
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Informative and up to date.
- By Kevin on 01-10-16
By: Clay Shirky
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The Business of Platforms
- Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power
- By: Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie
- Narrated by: Sean Patrick Hopkins
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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A trio of experts on high-tech business strategy and innovation reveal the principles that have made platform businesses the most valuable firms in the world and the first trillion-dollar companies.
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doesnt teach you much
- By Kenneth on 06-07-20
By: Michael A. Cusumano, and others
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Becoming Facebook
- The 10 Challenges That Defined the Company That's Disrupting the World
- By: Mike Hoefflinger
- Narrated by: Nicholas Techosky
- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Facebook's founding is legend: In a Harvard dorm, wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg invented a new way to connect with friends...and the rest is history. But for the people who actually molded this great idea into a game-changing $300 billion company, the experience was far more tumultuous and uncertain than we might expect. Mike Hoefflinger was one of those Facebook insiders.
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mainly a tribute to the success of FB
- By Anonymous User on 10-07-18
By: Mike Hoefflinger
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The Fourth Industrial Revolution
- By: Klaus Schwab
- Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 5 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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World-renowned economist Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, explains that we have an opportunity to shape the fourth industrial revolution, which will fundamentally alter how we live and work.
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Friendly reminding : On August 15th, 1971, the dec
- By steve white on 03-24-21
By: Klaus Schwab
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Breakpoint
- Why the Web Will Implode, Search Will Be Obsolete, and Everything Else You Need to Know About Technology Is in Your Brain
- By: Jeff Stibel
- Narrated by: Robert David Grant
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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We are living in a world in which cows send texts to farmers when they're in heat, where the most valuable real estate in New York City houses computers, not people, and some of humanity's greatest works are created by crowds, not individuals. We are in the midst of a networking revolution - set to transform the way we access the world's information and the way we connect with one another. Studying biological systems is perhaps the best way to understand such networks, and nature has a lesson for us if we care to listen: Bigger is rarely better in the long run.
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Meh
- By Customer on 12-07-14
By: Jeff Stibel
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What to Do When Machines Do Everything
- How to Get Ahead in a World of AI, Algorithms, Bots, and Big Data
- By: Malcolm Frank, Paul Roehrig, Ben Pring
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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What to Do When Machines Do Everything is a guidebook to succeeding in the next generation of the digital economy. When systems running on artificial intelligence can drive our cars, diagnose medical patients, and manage our finances more effectively than humans, it raises profound questions on the future of work and how companies compete.
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Assumes that machine learning will grow very slow
- By Nathan Burnham on 05-06-17
By: Malcolm Frank, and others
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Click Here to Kill Everybody
- Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World
- By: Bruce Schneier
- Narrated by: Roger Wayne
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Everything is a computer. Ovens are computers that make things hot; refrigerators are computers that keep things cold. These computers - from home thermostats to chemical plants - are all online. All computers can be hacked. And Internet-connected computers are the most vulnerable. Forget data theft: Cutting-edge digital attackers can now crash your car, your pacemaker, and the nation’s power grid. In Click Here to Kill Everybody, renowned expert and best-selling author Bruce Schneier examines the hidden risks of this new reality.
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Same old Bruce
- By Fausto Cepeda on 04-03-19
By: Bruce Schneier
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The Future of the Professions
- How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts
- By: Richard Susskind, Daniel Susskind
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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This book predicts the decline of today's professions and describes the people and systems that will replace them. In an Internet society, according to Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, we will neither need nor want doctors, teachers, accountants, architects, the clergy, consultants, lawyers, and many others to work as they did in the 20th century.
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I Hope It's Not All True
- By John on 05-01-16
By: Richard Susskind, and others
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The Zero Marginal Cost Society
- The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism
- By: Jeremy Rifkin
- Narrated by: David Cochran Heath
- Length: 14 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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In this provocative new book, Rifkin argues that the coming together of the Communication Internet with the fledgling Energy Internet and Logistics Internet in a seamless twenty-first-century intelligent infrastructure—the Internet of Things—is boosting productivity to the point where the marginal cost of producing many goods and services is nearly zero, making them essentially free.
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Not a convincing argument-just stories & ideology
- By Pierre Parent on 07-26-17
By: Jeremy Rifkin
What listeners say about Meganets
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Michael P Ross
- 06-03-23
Supports censorship while being ironically unaware of author’s own biases
If you like a supposedly non-fiction book whose arguments are blatantly based on the authors clear biases, this book is for you.
Far left garbage.
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- Richard M Dreyling
- 09-05-23
Very well reasoned and researched book - but understandable for beginners
I found the book through very well researched, and well reasoned. Some inflammatory reviews say that this book supports censorship. It does not. It supports dampening the effects of echo chambers, which is a worthwhile goal for a functioning society - and not that large a portion of the book.
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- Bhavtosh Vajpayee
- 10-12-23
Another trite book full of cliches!
Tired of listening to the journey so far. More interested in the future. This book bores.
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