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Don't Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech by [Rana Foroohar]

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Rana Foroohar

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A penetrating indictment of how today’s largest tech companies are hijacking our data, our livelihoods, our social fabric, and our minds—from an acclaimed Financial Times columnist and CNN analyst

WINNER OF THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Foreign Affairs, Evening Standard

“Don’t be evil” was enshrined as Google’s original corporate mantra back in its early days, when the company’s cheerful logo still conveyed the utopian vision for a future in which technology would inevitably make the world better, safer, and more prosperous.

Unfortunately, it’s been quite a while since Google, or the majority of the Big Tech companies, lived up to this founding philosophy. Today, the utopia they sought to create is looking more dystopian than ever: from digital surveillance and the loss of privacy to the spreading of misinformation and hate speech to predatory algorithms targeting the weak and vulnerable to products that have been engineered to manipulate our desires.

How did we get here? How did these once-scrappy and idealistic enterprises become rapacious monopolies with the power to corrupt our elections, co-opt all our data, and control the largest single chunk of corporate wealth—while evading all semblance of regulation and taxes? In Don’t Be Evil, Financial Times global business columnist Rana Foroohar tells the story of how Big Tech lost its soul—and ate our lunch.

Through her skilled reporting and unparalleled access—won through nearly thirty years covering business and technology—she shows the true extent to which behemoths like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon are monetizing both our data and our attention, without us seeing a penny of those exorbitant profits.

Finally, Foroohar lays out a plan for how we can resist, by creating a framework that fosters innovation while also protecting us from the dark side of digital technology.

Praise for Don’t Be Evil

“At first sight, Don’t Be Evil looks like it’s doing for Google what muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell did for Standard Oil over a century ago. But this whip-smart, highly readable book’s scope turns out to be much broader. Worried about the monopolistic tendencies of big tech? The addictive apps on your iPhone? The role Facebook played in Donald Trump’s election? Foroohar will leave you even more worried, but a lot better informed.”—Niall Ferguson, Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, and author of The Square and the Tower

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“This book goes beyond the economic problems of market distortion and monopoly power and examines the broader implications for society of the untrammeled and under-regulated Silicon Valley companies. Foroohar demonstrates that while the creed ‘don’t be evil’ may have initially inspired the Silicon Valley giants, its principle has long been left behind.”—Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate in economics

“If journalism is the first rough draft of history, then we are most fortunate to have Rana Foroohar’s laser vision and trenchant business analysis turned on the tech giants and the gluttonous anti-democratic surveillance capitalism that is their most far-reaching innovation. Foroohar’s examination of Big Tech’s audacity, plunder, and self-dealing economics is a crucial contribution to the growing debate on how to constrain the dark power of the tech corporations, binding them to the real needs of people and society.”—Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School

“Rana Foroohar’s new book explains how Big Tech firms have moved permanently beyond the reach of tax laws by leveraging the same opaque financial wizardry and scale that big banks did before the financial crisis, while also exploiting information asymmetries that demote us from citizens to mere consumers. Her urgent message: ‘Yes, we really are living in the Matrix,’ and it’s time to rise up and resist our algorithmic overlords. This book shows us how.”—Cathy O’Neil, The New York Times bestselling author of Weapons of Math Destruction and CEO of ORCAA

“The first book on the big tech crisis to propose a set of realistic solutions. This book should be read by every policy maker both in the United States and around the world. As Foroohar makes clear, the self-regulation of Big Tech is not an option, and she proposes real-world solutions that could make a big difference.”—Jonathan Taplin, Director Emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and author of Move Fast and Break Things

“Giant tech companies are an ungoverned global economic and social force that we all must understand. They contribute to division and threaten the ‘very cohesion of society.’ Foroohar’s big-picture thinking is much needed. This compelling and deeply informed book will help guide our responses to a dangerous new era.”—David Kirkpatrick, The New York Times bestselling author of The Facebook Effect

“Rana Foroohar is a beacon of insight in the world of financial journalism. In Don’t Be Evil, she applies her brilliance to the increasingly nightmarish behavior of tech giants like Amazon, Google, and Facebook. It is a must-read.”—Roger McNamee, The New York Times bestselling author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe

“When we choose technology’s convenience without considering its tradeoffs, we ceded control to a muscular, unregulated strain of capitalism that is now costing us far more than we thought. Don’t Be Evil comes just in time, with a warning citizens, policy makers, and the tech industry itself can no longer afford to ignore.”—John Battelle, co-founder of Wired and author of The Search

About the Author

Rana Foroohar is a global business columnist and an associate editor for the Financial Times and CNN’s global economic analyst. She was awarded the 2018 Best in Business Award by the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing (SABEW) for her opinion writing on the world’s technology companies. Previously, Foroohar was the assistant managing editor in charge of business and economics at Time, as well as the magazine’s economic columnist. She also spent thirteen years at Newsweek as an economic and foreign affairs editor and a foreign correspondent. During that time, she was awarded the German Marshall Fund’s Peter R. Weitz Prize for transatlantic reporting. She has received awards and fellowships from institutions such as the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the East-West Center. She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER 1

A Summary of the Case

“Don’t be evil” is the famous first line of Google’s original Code of Conduct, what seems today like a quaint relic of the company’s early days, when the crayon colors of the Google logo still conveyed the cheerful, idealistic spirit of the enterprise. How long ago that feels. Of course, it would be unfair to accuse Google of being actively evil. But evil is as evil does, and some of the things that Google and other Big Tech firms have done in recent years have not been very nice.

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin first dreamed up the idea for Google as Stanford graduate students, they probably didn’t imagine that the shiny apple of knowledge that was their search engine would ever get anyone expelled from paradise (as many Google executives have been over a variety of scandals in recent years). Nor could they have predicted the many embarrassments that would emanate from the Googleplex: Google doctoring its algorithms in ways that would deep-six rivals off the crucial first page of its search results. Google’s YouTube hosting instructional videos on how to build a bomb. Google selling ads to Russian agents, granting them use of the platform to spread misinformation and manipulate the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Google working on a potential search engine for China—one that would be compliant with the regime’s efforts to censor unwelcome results. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt leaving his position as executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, a few months after the New York Times revealed he’d been unduly influencing antitrust policy work at a think tank that both his family foundation and Google itself supported, going so far as to push for the firing of a policy analyst who dared to speculate about whether Google might be engaging in anticompetitive practices (something that Schmidt has denied). In May 2019, Schmidt announced he would be stepping down from the Alphabet board as well.

All of this may not exactly be evil, but it certainly is worrisome.

Google’s true sin, like that of many Silicon Valley behemoths, may simply be hubris. The company’s top brass always wanted it to be big enough to set its own rules, and that has been its downfall, just as it has been for so many Big Tech firms. But this is not a book about Google alone. It is a book about how today’s most powerful companies are bifurcating our economy, corrupting our political process, and fogging our minds. While Google will often stand as the poster child for the industry more generally, this book will also cover the other four FAANGs—Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix—as well as a number of additional platform giants, like Uber, that have come to dominate their respective spaces in the technology industry. I’ll also touch on the ways that a variety of older companies, from IBM to GM, are evolving in response to these new challengers. And I will look at the rise of a new generation of Chinese tech giants that is going where even the FAANGs don’t dare.

While there are plenty of companies both in Silicon Valley and elsewhere that illustrate the upsides and the downsides of digital transformation, the big technology platform firms have been the chief beneficiaries of the epic digital transformation we’re undergoing. They have replaced the industrialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the information-based economy that has come to define the twenty-first.

The implications are myriad, and I will track many of them, often via the Google narrative, which has been the marker for larger industry-wide shifts. Google has, after all, been the pioneer of big data, targeted advertising, and the type of surveillance capitalism that this book will cover. It was following the “move fast and break things” ethos long before Facebook.

I’ve been following the company for over twenty years, and I first encountered the celebrated Google founders, Page and Brin, not in the Valley, but in Davos, the Swiss gathering spot of the global power elite, where they’d taken over a small chalet to meet with a select group of media. The year was 2007. The company had just purchased YouTube a few months back, and it seemed eager to convince skeptical journalists that this acquisition wasn’t yet another death blow to copyright, paid content creation, and the viability of the news publications for which we worked.

Unlike the buttoned-up consulting types from McKinsey and BCG, or the suited executives from the old guard multinational corporations that roamed the promenades of Davos, their tasseled loafers slipping on the icy paths, the Googlers were the cool bunch. They wore fashionable sneakers, and their chalet was sleek, white, and stark, with giant cubes masquerading as chairs in a space that looked as though it had been repurposed that morning by designers flown in from the Valley. In fact, it may have been, and if so, Google wouldn’t have been alone in such excess. I remember attending a party once in Davos, hosted by Napster founder and former Facebook president Sean Parker, that featured giant taxidermy bears and a musical performance by John Legend.

Back in the Google chalet, Brin and Page projected a youthful earnestness as they explained the company’s involvement in authoritarian China, and insisted they’d never be like Microsoft, which was considered the corporate bully and monopolist of the time. What about the future of news, we wanted to know. After admitting that Page read only free news online whereas Brin often bought the Sunday New York Times in print (“It’s nice!” he said, cheerfully), the duo affirmed exactly what we journalists wanted to hear: Google, they assured us, would never threaten our livelihoods. Yes, advertisers were indeed migrating en masse from our publications to the Web, where they could target consumers with a level of precision that the print world could barely imagine. But not to worry. Google would generously retool our business model so we, too, could thrive in the new digital world.

I was much younger then, and not yet the (admittedly) cynical business journalist that I have become, and yet I still listened to that happy “future of news” lecture with some skepticism. Whether Google actually intended to develop some brilliant new revenue model or not, what alarmed me was that none of us were asking a far more important question. Sitting toward the back of the room, somewhat conscious of my relatively junior status, I hesitated, waiting until the final moments of the meeting before raising my hand.

“Excuse me,” I said. “We’re talking about all this like journalism is the only thing that matters, but isn’t this really about . . . democracy?” If newspapers and magazines are all driven out of business by Google or companies like it, I asked, how are people going to find out what’s going on?

Larry Page looked at me with an odd expression, as if he was surprised that someone should be asking such a naïve question. “Oh, yes. We’ve got a lot of people thinking about that.”

Not to worry, his tone seemed to say. Google had the engineers working on that “democracy” problem. Next question?

Well, it turns out that we did have to worry about democracy, and since November 2016, we have had to worry about it a lot more. And it’s impossible to ignore the obvious: As tech firms have become inexorably more powerful, our democracy has become more precarious. Newspapers and magazines have been hollowed out by Google and Facebook, which in 2018 together took 60 percent of the Internet advertising market. This is a key reason for the shuttering of some 1,800 newspapers between 2004 and 2018, a process that has left 200 counties with no paper at all, restricting the supply of reliable information that is the oxygen of democracy. And given that digital advertising surpassed TV ads in 2017, it’s clear that TV news will be the next to go. While cable news may have gotten a “Trump bump” in recent years, the longer term trend line is clear—TV will ultimately be disintermediated by Big Tech just the way print media has been.

But the trouble with Big Tech isn’t just an economic and business issue; it has political and cognitive implications as well. Often, these trends are written about in isolation, but in fact they are deeply intertwined. In this book, my goal is to connect the dots—to tell the whole story, which is far bigger than the sum of its parts. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07NKPVFRT
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Currency (November 5, 2019)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 5, 2019
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 7641 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 397 pages

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Rana Foroohar

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Rana Foroohar is the author of Don’t Be Evil, which won a Porchlight Business Book Award, and Makers and Takers. Currently the global business columnist and associate editor for the Financial Times and the global economic analyst for CNN, she has served as the assistant managing editor and economic columnist at Time and an economic and foreign affairs editor and foreign correspondent at Newsweek. She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and sits on the board of the Open Markets Institute.

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182 global ratings

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Chris

Insightful look into internet tech giants threat

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 23, 2020

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Don’t Be Evil is a broad, insightful look at large internet companies' threat to personal rights, democracy, and the political system than previous. It covers more ground and is more readable than “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” by Zuboff. (Zuboff’s book is well worth reading, more of an academic treatise with opinions/ideology tossed in. Filter the opinions to see there is a complete study of big tech surveillance, with evidence.)

“Evil” has enough evidence to support stories within the text, considerable evidence listed in the notes for those who doubt and wish to access it. I have downloaded a couple of citations, look forward to reading.

I can’t add much to Athan’s excellent November 18 summary except to note an area for extended consideration, the impact of 5G. I suspect 5G is likely to ramp up surveillance capitalism because of explosion of information and ease of capture (humorous vis a vis Shannon … “creation” of information). Given significant potential benefits of 5G in manufacturing and supply chains, I suspect Google will know more about how things work than companies. Because 5G is highly dependent on (distributed) software, hacking may be a problem (… doubtful robust hardware firewalls with processing power will be employed in the many types of internet connected devices … your appliances may be targets).

Re reviewers … From the tone Rana is clearly center left. However, how she sees this politically doesn’t negate her thesis and warnings. Everyone should think deeply about the implications of what has occurred with the rise of the internet data companies, consequences and eventualities for the current direction. The accumulation of economic and political power has reached beyond a tipping point. Being captive - products and services -to a very few companies isn’t much different than being captive to any system. Internet companies now dominate large pieces of the economy with lawmakers/regulators doing nothing except whine … lobbying money.

As a curious observer, I like evidence. A recent article on Amazon offers a tidbit. Though Amazon claims it is highly competitive because it receives only a small percent of retail revenue, many interviews among the hundreds of 3d party sellers on the Amazon platform show sellers feel they have no choice … Amazon or no market. For its part Amazon takes a small percent of each sale (same as credit card companies and banks) for no effort expended except allowing a listing, micro incremental capital. In this sense Amazon’s return is likely higher than Visa/MC. Another lookback by Tim Wu noted Google and Facebook have eliminated start up competitors by each buring more than 100 companies, leveraging their financial power/income from running virtual monopolies … money from ad sales based on your data (~$550B global, $330B digital). This doesn’t feel like competitive ‘free market capitalism, questionable whether good for the country. The beat goes on, with fewer choices online and brick and mortar.

6 people found this helpful

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Phil Simon

An important set of cohesive questions about Big Tech

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 1, 2019

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Building upon books such as World Without End and Weapons of Math Destruction, Don't Be Evil makes the case that Big Tech is doing more harm than good. Foroohar proves her central thesis in spades. I find it impossible to argue the opposite these days using any reasonable standard. Her thoughts on venture capital, the bias of algorithms, election interference, and other related topics should gave anyone pause.

Sure, I'd nitpick with a few of her assertions. For instance, at one point she refers to Uber has profitable when it's lost billions every quarter. Perhaps this was just an oversight. More generally, I also have difficulty putting Netflix in the same bucket as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google when it comes to power. FAANGS might make for a nice acronym but I'd argue that Microsoft exerts far more power than the world's most valuable streaming company.

Regardless of my small gripes, this book is spot-on. Foroohar synthesizes the main arguments against the tech titans that have become far too powerful—and I defended them for years. Now more than ever, we need to ask ourselves tough questions about Big Tech's power. Promises that the industry will regulate itself are as laughable as banks making the same claim prior to the financial crisis. Her final chapter is her strongest and it's high time to act now with sensible, bi-partisan legislation and oversight.

18 people found this helpful

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AmazonUser

Very thorough and provocative

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 10, 2022

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This is an extremely detailed account of the lengths to which Big Tech is willing to go to maintain control of our lives. Read it and you will be enlightened and better informed. Wake up, people.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 29, 2019

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This is an important book. Makers and Takers was an important book. Rana writes well. She researches well and presents arguments in ways that require serious consideration - even if they challenge the readers a priori assumptions on socio-political matters.

She brings the credibility of her role at the FT to writing a book that, while it may not be fully aligned with a majority of FT readers (I am making an assumption that FT readership screws conservative or libertarian - that may be wrong) nevertheless can not be brushed aside.

We do enjoy the convenience that Big Tech brings to our lives. We may need to think a bit harder about the trade-offs.

While Rana my not be prepared for this, or inclined to go in this direction, the natural pathway to implementing her suggestions for change is a political one. She should give it some consideration!

Congratulations

4 people found this helpful

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Thoughtworks

Very up-to-date on the effects of technologists on our society

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 21, 2020

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These days, if you are reading a book on AI or platform technologies you need an author who understands how technology has merged with capitalism...that they can no longer be separated...and thus the utopian predictions and expectations for the future are misplaced. This book is an excellent warning not only about the inroads surveillance capitalism has already made, but great insight into the distorted system of values and priorities of those behind platform technologies. I highly recommend this book (and Shoshana Zuboff's "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism"). They tell the truth and don't waste much time insulting the reader by trying to be optimistic!

5 people found this helpful

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Martin Lobel

Why privacy on the internet is important

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 6, 2020

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Professor Zubroff wrote a 600 page academic tome entitled Surveillance Capitalism that has become must reading to those who are concerned with how personal data on the internet is used and abused, but like most academic tomes is almost unintelligible to the average reader. This 200 page book covers much of the same ground but is intelligible and should be read by anyone who is on the internet. It explains how valuable our personal data is and asks whether we shouldn't share the enormous profits that Facebook, etc earn from it.

4 people found this helpful

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Steven S

Insightful but Diffuse

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 18, 2021

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There is some nice information and story in the book, but the author tries to make everything Amazon does a problem and that diminishes the power of her argument Is the main problem, the surveillance, the business behavior, the lobbying or.....? Or ,simply the fact that they make a lot of money?

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Athan

A punch in the stomach

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 18, 2019

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Don’t be fooled by the urbane and level-headed language of Rana Foroohar’s second book, this is a laser-focused polemic against Big Tech that hits the bullseye.

For starters, it’s hyper-readable. I downed it in ten hours straight, with two five-minute brakes for airplane coffee. The reason it’s so readable is the author never neglects the actors, who are presented to you in flesh and blood, with a side-serving of light gossip and her own personal experiences. So this is about Larry Page, Sergei Brin and Larry Schmidt, Jeff Bezos, Travis Kalanick and a sprinkling of Steve Jobs, but, very significantly, also about Robert Bork and Lina Khan.

Who’s Lina Khan? Well, yes. “Don’t be Evil” is one of two books that have come out simultaneously from the fertile ground that is Barry Lynn’s Open Market Institute. You might have heard of the mini-scandal that occurred in 2017 when Google as good as ousted Lynn from a supposedly independent, progressive think-tank they fund. He had the good sense to give Foroohar a directorship in his new gig. And, boy, has she delivered. As for 30-yr-old antitrust law superstar Khan, she cut her teeth there under Lynn. Bang!

And what does the book have to say about Big Tech, then?

First comes the requisite 85-page run through the events that got us here and an attempt to place today’s Big Tech in the context of the 20th (as opposed to the 21st) century. Essentially, in what is the weakest, but also the most gossipy / journalistic / personal part of the book, the author argues that what we have here is a combination of the tech mania that led to the tech bust of 2000, fused with the takeover of the economy by the financial giants, which led to the financial crisis of 2008. It’s alright, but tenuous and perhaps even forgettable and it keeps you from the golden part of the book that follows.

Chapter 5 is the story of how the lure of the dollar led to Google losing its innocence and falling from Paradise. And what big tech did about it, when it decided it liked money. Chapter and verse. The patent laws they pushed through so they can eat shallow-pocketed minnows whole, their successful campaign under the Obama administration, under the banner that “information wants to be free,” but also the 1998 Clinton law they lucked into, that exempts them from having to police their content. Read it and weep.

Chapter 6 argues, extremely persuasively, that big tech has embraced academic psychological research and weaponized its main relevant conclusion (the mice must be rewarded in a random fashion if they are to tug on the lever all the time) to install a “slot machine” in everybody’s pocket, now we all carry our lives on our smartphones. The argument is made that the addiction to “likes” and messages we’ve been expecting is, physiologically even, no different from addiction to cocaine and that Big Tech knows this and explicitly exploits it (with internal emails at shops like Facebook et al. provided as the proof.)

Chapter 7 explains how the Network Effect works, creating natural monopolies. The author does not want to lose the reader, she does not launch into a diatribe on how natural monopolies are best run (or at the very least, strictly regulated) by the state; she does one better: she convinces you they are dangerous without even appealing to the economics.

Chapter 8 explains, for those who’ve been on planet Zog, that gig work is crap work, leads to massive income disparities between its foot soldiers and its generals and is coming to a theatre near you. For now taxi drivers and journalists, next radiologists and then whatever you’re doing, and it won’t be fun.

Chapter 9 is a not-so-impressive, it must be said (but hey, grab Tim Wu’s book if you care so much) primer on what the Chicago school did to antitrust law (it moved it from “monopolies are bad, period” to “monopolies are bad only if they leave the consumer worse off”) and attempts to attack it from two utilitarian, as opposed to political, angles:

1. These days you should not measure the effects in dollars, because it is your data rather than your dollars that monopolies covet and they have done a very good job at obfuscating what it’s worth.

2. These behemoths are too big for their own bosses to understand, what with Amazon running a publisher, a bookstore, a competitor to FedEx, a cloud computing facility etc. etc. and they have become exactly like the banks that failed: too big to fail, too complex to understand and too big to regulate.

Chapter 10 is the most devastating: it reminded me of Uwe Reinhardt’s book about healthcare in America, which argued that while in principle the government ought to be running healthcare, in practice the government is bought-and-paid-for by corporate interests in today’s America, so the idea is not practicable. Here, Rana Faroohar details how deeply Google and Amazon and co. have managed to embed themselves in the legislative process by throwing millions and millions at everything government-related that moves. The chapter is called “In the Swamp.” In the swamp, indeed. Yuck.

Chapter 11 is about how Big Tech defends the advertiser’s right to spread lies. It does not much add to what was discussed earlier, I think it’s there so Democrats can read it and feel less bad about having fielded Hillary and then recommend the book to their friends…

Chapter 12, about China, makes two points. First it explains that Big Tech is no different from Old Media czar Rupert (he does not get mentioned by name) Murdoch: it’s happy to look the other way in China, because it’s such a big market. Next it builds up the argument what I consider to be THE MOST IMPORTANT POINT THIS BOOK MAKES, to wit:

Acemoglu and Robinson argue, very convincingly, that China is not a free country. And because the most important ingredient for growth is the ability to think freely, to experiment and to make mistakes, China’s probably already (pun not intended) hit a wall: its creatives, who do not want to live under constant surveillance, will flee to the West.

However, Big Tech now has gotten so monopolistic here in the West, Foroohar argues, that it also stifles growth. Every competitor that gets bought out, lest it grows to challenge the incumbents, every patent that gets infringed, every view that gets silenced gets in the way of the process that makes us the fierce competitors that we are and makes us more vulnerable to our competitors.

Wow! Worth the purchase price and the petty talk about her poor parenting, I’d say.

A full chapter follows, with ideas about what to do next. They’re all brilliant. Buy the book and read them!

10 people found this helpful

Brian Yarwood

Dont be Evil

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 4, 2019

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I follow Rana Foroohar via her Financial Times writing; her book Makers v Takers was an excellent read but this particular book is just idealism cobbled together about changing Big Tech into a Humanistic Centre and not a profit centre.
Academics and connected politicos helped with
the writing of this book and what do they know about
every day struggles of the people … NOTHING.
Save your money or better still buy... the four by Scott Galloway

2 people found this helpful

ArgoLies

Not everyone in tech is a nerd

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 15, 2022

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Well written with interesting ideas, but rather superficial. The author repeatedly refers to anyone in the tech industry as a nerd and it becomes quite off-putting after a while. The rank and file engineers and scientists (not 'techies' as Foroohar likes to call them) are just as clever as the resplendent author even if they don't have a humanities degree. But we can all agree that we don't like Zuckerberg, so that's something.

b

Good read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 4, 2021

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Bought this for a friend and she raved about it. I asked to be lent it but it seems there are a list of others in the queue before me to whom she has lent it so I still have not read it.

D. Hood

Brilliant inside into Big Tec and how it works behind the seens

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 4, 2019

Verified Purchase

Highly recommend this book for anyone interested in a well researched insite exposing the real cost of your free Google Facebook and Twitter accounts, the new oil data should not be mined and sold to the highest bidder only to be used against you, AI the biggest battlefield for the next generation, regulation is required asap otherwise the very fabric of society will fall apart.

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Don't Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech Kindle Edition

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