“How to slow down in a world that is speeding up?” Johann Hari writes in the book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again. He outlines twelve problems for our individual and collective attention span, ability to focus.
Tag: Privacy
Technoreligion: youth and grown-ups
It’s fascinating how much the grown-ups want to keep squeezing their own phones. No matter how much youth suffer or are exposed, we simply can’t let go of the screen ourselves. When will it stop?
Book review: Weapons of math destruction
Cathy O’Neil is a computer scientist and mathematician, who left the academic life for the financial industry in the early 2000’s, working with computers, for companies making lots of money. There she discovered what is now called Big Data and later became troubled by the purposes and intents of algorithms. After realising the even more troublesome side effects on society, she thus wrote this book, with the secondary title How Big Data increases inequality and threatens democracy.
Book review: Click here to kill everybody
For those who don’t know of Bruce Schneier, he’s one of the world’s most famous and prominent cybersecurity experts. If there’s one person you’d like to guide you and hold your hand while in need, Schneier is the one. This book is about basics of cybersecurity, not the technical aspects, but rather about security on the Internet and the Internet+, the interconnected world of the Internet of things.
Book review: Reset
The director of the famous Citizen Lab has written about the state of the (tech) world and solutions to the crisis of democracy and tech. If there’s one book to rule them all, this is the one.
Book review: The perfect police state
This could well be a follow-up to Beijmo’s De kan inte stoppa oss. Instead of Syria as the main stage, the story and its focus are China. Writer Geoffrey Cain presents himself early as the journalist he is, when travelling Xinjiang in western China, though the main character in the narrative is Maysem, an Uighur who has escaped Xinjiang.
Book review: Privacy is power
Carissa is an associate professor at the University of Oxford and has led an extensive research project on privacy, Data, privacy & the individual. Here, I will present some topics of the book for the interested. I should emphasize that this review concerns the 2020 edition.