Our Biggest Fight

March 11, 2024
McCourt, executive chairman of the McCourt Global asset management firm, debuts with a run-of-the-mill plea to transform humanity’s relationship with technology. “The internet... is the primary cause of a pervasive unease in the United States,” McCourt contends, citing the usual misdeeds covered in countless Big Tech takedowns. He argues that cyberbullying lies behind a spike in suicides among people under 24 and that Facebook’s practice of garnering clicks by presenting users with content they’re likely to disagree with has driven political polarization. The solution, he asserts, lies in implementing a new internet protocol that would give users control over their personal data and allow them to withhold it from websites. The proposal is a somewhat novel spin on the Web3 vision of a decentralized internet, but it’s undercut by bombastic prose (at one point, McCourt urges readers to undertake the issue of data privacy “with the spirit of the American revolutionaries in 1776”). It’s also not clear that stricter control over personal data would be the panacea McCourt portrays it to be. For instance, it remains foggy how data privacy would lead to a “prosocial internet in which we are incentivized to develop useful connections and engage in healthy, collaborative interactions.” Readers drawn to the topic would be better off with Byron Tau’s Means of Control.

March 15, 2024
A business executive in the tech space explores the problem of internet over-centralization and how it can be resolved. The internet began as a "utopian dream" that promised unfettered access to information and the opportunity for global collaboration. Three decades later, the Silicon Valley giants that dominate it have led to what McCourt calls "digital feudalism." The "black box" technology of proprietary algorithms has allowed corporations like Facebook and Google to treat users as little more than profit-generating information mines. McCourt, assisted by Money Reimagined podcast host Casey, suggests that this unchecked desire to control data for self-serving ends is at the heart of the dysfunction that now plagues American democracy. Not only has it led to the spread of socially divisive disinformation--as evidenced in the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018--on social media; it has also fostered blindness to such social media ills as cyberbullying, which in turn has given rise to a mental health crisis among younger, more vulnerable users. McCourt believes that the way individuals can reassert control is by using a Decentralized Social Networking Protocol, which offers users the ability to control "different types of information about them and their social connections." The premise behind the author's argument--that decentralizing corporate autocratic control over online information will be crucial to mending a broken democratic society--is undeniably important. His arguments are not without flaws, however--e.g., he fails to offer convincing arguments about how DSNP will motivate newly empowered individual users to consistently act in the "constructive, prosocial" ways that larger entities like Facebook and Google have not. Still, McCourt offers much-needed insight into a system that, as central as it has become to human life, poses threats to our freedom and well-being. An illuminating, provocative, and disturbing analysis of our current digital age.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.