Category: Future & Tech

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

Industrial capitalism exploited nature and gave us the bounty of comforts we enjoy in the modern era. Surveillance capitalism is exploiting human nature. The consequences are that there is increasingly no refuge, no sanctuary, from the relentless efforts of corporations that are intent on controlling every facet of an individual’s existence. In the current trajectory, it will lead to a further consolidation of wealth and power. Not an easy read, but most definitely a must read.

Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture

The premise is excellent. Our consumption, sharing and creation of data could tell us a lot about our society and the evolution of our culture in different parts of the world. The problem is, the book is based solely on the authors’ experiments with datasets using Google Books Ngram Viewer. 30 million books digitized by Google. A lot of books, but still a small subset. The book doesn’t match the expectations set by the title, but is still an interesting read.

Everybody Lies

Everybody lies, as the title suggests, to their colleagues, friends, spouse and most importantly, to themselves. What they search for, and what they click, are better indicators of their true nature. This is the premise of the book, and a major portion of it is dedicated to reasoning out how the troves of data we generate can lead to fundamental insights. But it also provides a counter balance towards the end – the limits of data, intangible measures and the ethics of mining data. The potential of data to create new understanding in social sciences and human behaviour – reason enough to read this!