"The New Digital Age" by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. This book made several predictions about the new era with increased connectivity, most of which had a political focus, and the remaining predictions might be obvious to people in the tech industry. This book is comparable to George Orwell's "1984" in making insightful predictions about how controlling information would be the way of the future, but the writing is not at all comparable to 1984. Overall it was fairly dry.
What I found most interesting in this book is not so much predictions about the future, but anecdotes about the present. Anecdotes about how cellphones helped Congolese people in delivering fish to market, or how Egyptian government shutting down the internet was a trigger for people who would otherwise passively observe to become active protesters, or how it was cheaper to make a phone call from Somalia to United States than vice versa. I wish there were more of these anecdotes, and that they are not so scattered throughout the book.
In the end, this book was not quite what I expected. I feel that it was more "The New Digital Age for the Inner Party", and I wished it was "The New Digital Age for the Proles".
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