New Dark Age

New Dark Age brings rather critial (maybe even pesimistic) view on recent technology development. It also describes how did computers evolve into their current shape and which important players affected their historicla development.

Key part of the book attempts to discuss recent development in recent cloud technology, software as a service platforms and their impact on current world.

Some chapters provide rather frightening perspectives on how technology shapes our minds and lives. Kodak cameras being racist, children getting addicted to unboxing videos full of product placement on Youtube or microtrading stock market patterns that help destabilize world economies. Those are examples of where technology is rather a bad master than a good servant to us.

It is hard to reason against arguments provided by the book why all those tools and technologies are harmful. I believe that the misuse is not 'by-design' but mostly an unintended consequence of their real world usage. It is hard to design a tool without any major flaws.

In order to happily recomend this book, I'd need a bit balanced approach of its author. As I wrote above, it's hard to doubt about provided facts. But what could or even better should we do about those problems? Surely - the first thing we need to do is to identify problems in order to be able to do something with them (if we want to). Maybe it was not the aim of the book, but I'd expect at least a tiny bit of that consctructive approach that would provide some alternative way how to do things better.