It is tempting to think of the internet as a revolutionary and transformative tool. But neither is really true, contends professor of history and philosophy of science Justin E.H. Smith. In The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, he argues that the idea has been in the air for centuries and that the lofty aspirations and dreams of its founders—that it would improve society—have died. Some of the observations here are absolute gems, though you will have to follow Smith through some diversions to get to them. Unfortunately, the book leaves the reader hanging at the end and does not deliver on some of its promises.

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning, written by Justin E.H. Smith, published by Princeton University Press in May 2022 (hardback, 195 pages)

Smith hinted at the long prehistory of the internet in Irrationality, a book I enjoyed. Here, he delivers on that promise. As before, his writing can be a bit convoluted but is never impenetrable. Readers are advised, however, that this book is decidedly not a history of how the internet was invented and initially lived as the ARPANET. For that, you should turn to e.g. A Brief History of the Future and the somewhat older Where Wizards Stay Up Late. Judging by some of the negative reviews I have seen, a number of people came to this book with that expectation, in which case The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is is, well, not what you think it is. Let us take a closer look at what he delivers instead.

Smith opens with a searing critique. The lofty hopes and ambitions behind the internet—that with endless information at our fingertips and the ability to connect to anyone, anywhere, we would create a better world—have been crushed by social media’s rise to dominance over the last decade. To some extent, he joins the chorus of recent social commentaries that point out the price of constant connection: how it is addictive, erodes deep thought, undermines business and politics, turns us into bigots, and has made a business model out of mining the natural resource that is your attention.

But Smith goes well beyond moral panic and points out that not all of this is new. Books and the printing press were already condemned for eroding the art of memorising information, while one 17th-century writer complained of being distracted by trivialities such as books, maps, and letters. What is different is that the internet is “explicitly designed to prod the would-be attender ever onward from one monetizable object to the next” (p. 38), thus thwarting sustained attention. There is no interest here in conflict resolution or collective deliberation, “social media are in this respect engines of perpetual disagreement” (p. 52). Our online interactions have turned into an existential game that rewards us with “likes”, “shares”, or some other virtual currency. Often without realising it, we are using “what is essentially a privately owned point-scoring video game as if it were the public sphere” (p. 54). And this algorithmically-driven way of thinking has spilt back into our society and politics.

“Some of the observations here are absolute gems, though you will have to follow Smith through some diversions to get to them.”

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the technology, adds Smith. This failure is more likely explained by the underlying economic model. In other words, it is not the tool that is faulty, it is the wielder. Smith is convinced that a historical investigation into the origins and development of the internet could help us improve it and the rest of the book ponders how things got to be this way. Spoiler alert: “Things got this way as a cumulative effect of our simply doing what we have always done” (p. 56). Or to put it more bluntly: it is the humans that suck. This echoes what Mark Manson has written as a revision of his earlier thinking about social media.

What follows are four chapters that detour into related fields to various degrees. Smith is at his most convincing when he shows how long the idea of telecommunication was in the air before it became a reality with e.g. semaphore or the telegraph. Earlier still, archaeological evidence shows that we had long-distance networks of exchange that “reach as far back in human prehistory as we might wish to go” (p. 77). The late-adopter problem—the idea that we only recently invented something that other organisms do naturally—falls apart in Smith’s hands. And one might even wish to extend this further and question the distinction between natural and artificial. By that line of reasoning, our technologies “are only the concretions of a certain kind of natural activity in which human beings have been engaging all along [and] is only one more recent layer of the ecology of the planet as a whole” (p. 84); a planet rich in communication networks between animals, plants, fungi, and other organisms.

The real detours start in subsequent chapters where Smith considers the history of computing more generally. Though he admits he strays quite far from his principal concern with the internet, he contends that the two cannot be easily separated and that their histories are intimately entangled. This sees Smith wrangle with various philosophical questions. Is intentionality built into the internet? He thinks meaning only appears in the mind of the users at the terminal points of the network. Are we approaching the threshold where AI will become capable of conscious understanding? He warns tech enthusiasts that “calculating is not thinking” (p. 106). And does the mind work like a computer? He argues this metaphor is only the latest in a long line of explanations that instead reveal the dominant or fashionable technology of the era.

“Perhaps, Smith argues, technological progress does not provide us with new experiences, perhaps it just provides “ever new ways of activating the sort of experience we as human beings have always had“”

Furthermore, Smith discusses devices both imagined and real. Examples of the former are Roger Bacon’s Brazen Head which would answer yes/no questions and Semyov Korsakov’s ideoscope which was to be a mechanical memory. Examples of the latter are Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine and Analytical Engine, but especially Joseph Marie Jacquard’s automated loom that was programmable with punched cards and could be considered a 3D-printer avant la lettre. Computer technology owes a debt to weaving technology and the metaphors of fabric and threads are particularly persistent whenever thinkers have envisioned action at a distance. Smith suggests some metaphors are so powerful that they can literally take shape: “manners of speaking become manners of world-building” (p. 149).

A final chapter praises Wikipedia as a rare example of a web initiative that has not been corrupted and asks how much difference there is between the mental travel allowed by browsing the internet versus reading a book or telling stories around a fire. Perhaps, Smith argues, technological progress does not provide us with new experiences, perhaps it just provides “ever new ways of activating the sort of experience we as human beings have always had” (p. 166).

Unfortunately, Smith ends here, leaving the reader hanging in my opinion. I missed a final chapter that tied together all his philosophical wanderings and circled back to the opening gambit. Although he delivers on the promise of telling us, with some detours, what the internet is and where it came from, he does not deliver on the promise of where it will go or how his historical understanding might address the problems he so explicitly highlighted at the start. Overall then, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is asks for a bit of buy-in from its readers. As I hope to have shown with the above quotes, there are some gems to be found if you are willing to accompany Smith, but I can see how the book might not satisfy everyone and leave some readers befuddled.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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What is the price of humanity’s progress? The cover of this book, featuring a dusty landscape of tree stumps, leaves little to the imagination. In the eyes of French journalist and historian Laurent Testot it has been nothing short of cataclysmic. Originally published in French in 2017, The University of Chicago Press published the English translation at the tail-end of 2020.

Early on, Testot makes clear that environmental history as a discipline can take several forms: studying both the impact of humans on the environment, and of the environment on human affairs, as well as putting nature in a historical context. Testot does all of this in this ambitious book as he charts the exploits of Monkey—his metaphor for humanity—through seven revolutions and three million years.

Cataclysms: An Environmental History of Humanity, written by Laurent Testot, published by The University of Chicago Press in November 2020 (hardback, 452 pages)

To be frank, Testot deals with the first 2,988,000 years in the first two chapters. Understandably, as the pace of progress was initially slow, and comparatively little information is available to us from the palaeontological and archaeological records. Thus, he starts his history proper with the agricultural revolution ~12,000 years ago. Given the synthesizing nature of this book, Cataclysms will be a feast of recognition for readers that are familiar with the literature.

Some examples include the near-simultaneous rise of agriculture in several places, with geography playing an important role in which plants and animals were available to domesticate, or the fall of the Late-Bronze Age civilizations in the 12th century BCE. The myth of virgin rainforests and the long history of agriculture practised in the jungle. The microbiological onslaught that accompanied the Columbian exchange when Christopher Columbus and other explorers brought new epidemics to the Americas, or the scourge of mosquito-borne diseases that later decimated European colonialists overseas. The medieval Little Ice Age and the global crises it precipitated, or the worldwide impact of the Tambora volcanic eruption. The Great Acceleration in the 20th century and the recognition of the Anthropocene. All of these have been chronicled at length in books and other publications.

“Given the synthesizing nature of this book, Cataclysms will be a feast of recognition for readers that are familiar with the literature.”

Testot also mentions episodes that I was barely familiar with; partially, I suspect, because he can draw on the French history literature. For example the eruption of the Samalas volcano that seems to have served as a transition between the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. Or the 15th-century mining for silver in the Andes and the immense pollution that caused. Or the environmental roots of the expression “mad as a hatter” (it involves the 17th-century beaver trade). Cataclysms sometimes seems to forget it is an environmental history book. Thus, the environment takes a backseat when he describes the Axial Age, the period between 800 and 300 BCE that saw the birth of universal religions and philosophies in both Asia and Europe that are still with us today. Similarly, the chapter charting the rise of money, empires, and trade in Europe and Asia before the Common Era only at the very end examines the environmental impact of it all.

The book’s style might divide opinions. Testot throws all his eggs in the proverbial narrative basket. The book is clearly deeply researched, but the notes section at the end encompasses a mere 16 pages. Testot must have decided that supporting every claim and fact with a footnote would have distracted from the story he tells. Although the references contain many interesting books and publications, those wishing to check up on certain claims will have to do their own research. Furthermore, the book is strikingly devoid of photos, maps, graphs, and tables, bar a single chart of the human world population through time in the appendix. As such, I felt Cataclysms did not deliver on the dustjacket’s promise of providing “the full tally” the way e.g. Vaclav Smil did in Harvesting the Biosphere. Those wanting a more data-driven overview will probably want to check out Cataclysms‘s big contender for 2020, Daniel R. Headrick’s Humans versus Nature. I had the chance to rifle through a copy, though not yet read it in full. At 604 pages with a 100-page notes section (and some illustrations), it promises to be a denser read.

“[The book] will undoubtedly charm newcomers to the field with its narrative style and ambitious scope […] but I suspect that seasoned readers will crave something more dense and data-heavy.”

Testot’s outlook for the future is bleak, though his concluding chapter wanders somewhat aimlessly. Rather than offering an overview of which planetary boundaries we have breached and how far in overshoot we are, Testot focuses on what he calls the upcoming Evolutive Revolution before turning to some likely consequences of climate change. This final revolution could either pan out as the pipe-dream of transhumanism where nano-, bio-, and information technologies converge into the singularity that would make humans immortal / obsolete as Artificial Intelligence takes over (something Testot is critical of), or we may end up as mutants in the chemical cesspit that we are making of our planet. Throw in a conclusion and an epilogue to the English edition that both reiterate main points from the book, and it starts to feel a little bit like Tolkien’s struggle to let the reader go in the last book of The Lord of the Rings.

Environmental history has become a rather crowded subject and opinions will probably be divided on whether Cataclysms stands out from the crowd sufficiently. It will undoubtedly charm newcomers to the field with its narrative style and ambitious scope—Testot knows how to spin a fine yarn and provides an entry point to many fascinating chapters in world history that readers will want to explore further. I certainly enjoyed reading it, but I suspect that seasoned readers will crave something more dense and data-heavy.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

Cataclysms

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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2020. A time of Trump. Written during a period of pandemic, it is a chronicle of conspiracies embellished with the flowers of falsehoods. In other words, it is tempting to think of the current moment as one of irrationality run rampant. If you have been entertaining similar thoughts, Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason provides a poignant note and a fascinating reflection. Because, when you take some distance, you might ask if it has ever been different. How many people past have wondered the same from their unique vantage point? Have we really made any progress towards enlightenment, or is our history merely the back-and-forth sloshing of the tides of reason and unreason?

Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason, written by Justin E.H. Smith, published by Princeton University Press in April 2019 (hardback, 348 pages)

Justin E.H. Smith, a professor of the history and philosophy of science, ranges far and wide in this book. Nine chapters reveal the persistence and pervasiveness of irrationality by spanning such diverse topics as logic, reason, dreams, art, (pseudo)science, the Enlightenment, the internet, jokes and lies, and death. From Ancient Greece to today, he gives voice to philosophers, writers, poets, scientists, and other intellectuals. Lest this “abundance of illustrations and […] instructive ornamentation” (p. 6) gives you the idea that the book is a hodgepodge, there is a clearly formulated and thought-provoking argument at the heart of Irrationality, cleverly illustrated by the dust jacket of the hardback. Rather than two points at opposite ends of a line, the rational and irrational birth each other in an endless cycle. And any attempt to permanently quell the irrational, is, ultimately, an exercise in irrationality itself.

Logic, for instance, can be twisted into fallacious arguments known as sophisms. Smith calls them “the soured, curdled form of arguments […] great fun, and highly seductive” (p. 33). The loaded question “when did you stop beating your wife?” is likely to be answered with “I never beat my wife”, inviting the follow-up “therefore you never stopped beating your wife”. Closely related to jokes, they “function as little explosions, smoke bombs we set off to confuse or to stun as we advance our own interests” (p. 35). Similarly, an Enlightenment ideal such as free speech “has been transformed into a cudgel by which to intimidate and antagonize other groups” (p. 188). One only has to think of recent cases of white supremacists marching under that slogan.

Perhaps the most significant area where rationality and irrationality can seamlessly bleed into each other is mortality. Self-destructive behaviours, whether smoking or speeding when driving a car, are impulsive, reckless, and, yes, irrational. But, argued Socrates already, so is pretending that you are going to live forever. Between these two forms of irrationality lies a vast grey area where one man’s rational is another man’s irrational.

“[…] an Enlightenment ideal such as free speech “has been transformed into a cudgel by which to intimidate and antagonize other groups“”

Other chapters highlight how irrationality is part and parcel of being human. Take dreams, which have been dealt with differently at different times. Is our current approach of shutting the significance of dreams out of our waking lives the most rational? Or did dream-interpreting cultures, such as the Native American Iroquois tribe that Smith mentions here, deal with them better? Similarly, artistic creation can be considered irrational for indulging the imagination our minds are naturally prone to. At the same time, argues Smith, it offers an effective release valve for transgressions that we are better off not acting out, providing a healthy compromise.

Two chapters that were particularly close to my heart were those on pseudoscience and the internet. Sure, Smith touches on the demarcation problem (in layman’s terms, the surprisingly difficult challenge of telling science from bunk), but it was his other observations that really struck a chord with me. Why do these groups go down the irrational route of trying to beat science at its own game? Why assume the trappings of scientific enquiry, complete with the propping up of faulty arguments with empirical data and, in the case of creationism, even a Creation Museum? When discussing flat-earthers, Smith observes that “the commitment to the actual content of the theory—that the world is flat—is rather minimal, and that the true nature of the movement is that it is a protest, against elite authorities telling us what we must believe” (p. 149). This is about trust, specifically the breakdown of public trust in expertise. Smith argues that claims that knowledge is being hidden from us, hushed up by grand conspiracies, is the bigger danger from these movements than their misrepresentation of the facts.

“This is about […] the breakdown of public trust […] claims that knowledge is being hidden from us, hushed up by grand conspiracies, is the bigger danger from these movements than their misrepresentation of the facts.”

The other thing we agree on is the influence of the internet which has made an undeniable difference between irrationality then and now, and truly makes our age different. It has failed spectacularly at being the great leveller that people envisioned it would be. Smith singles out the rise of social media giants in particular. It should come as no surprise that companies driven by a profit motive, whose proprietary algorithms seek to divide rather than unite, are utterly unsuitable to be the gatekeepers of democracy and civil society. And yet here we are. Unending online arguments about trivialities are not democracy, but they do take our time, energy, and attention away from more pressing problems.

There are many other examples and histories that I have not touched upon here, and not all of them necessarily tie neatly into the book’s core argument. Smith often writes in long sentences that encompass many subclauses, but there is an elegance to his penmanship that avoids it from being impenetrable or verbose. He also ably compensates for my lack of knowledge of the many intellectuals and philosophers discussed here, introducing them briefly. I was pleased by how accessible and readable Irrationality turned out to be.

Has the world gone crazy? Undoubtedly. But also: unsurprisingly. Smith has written a timely reflection on our ingrained irrationality. Equally timely is the release date of the paperback, currently due in December. With the hardback having been published before the COVID-19 pandemic, and with the American presidential election mere weeks away as I write this, it will be interesting to see if Smith will update the book to touch on some of the irrational excesses we have witnessed since.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

Irrationality

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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Growth as a process is ubiquitous. It is the hallmark of every living organism. It motivates much of what we as humans do, as often unspoken as it is outspoken. It is the narrative lens through which we examine societies and civilizations past and present. And it is the altar at which economists worship. You would think that nobody in their right mind would write a book that tries to encompass all of the above. Leave it to a deep thinker such as Vaclav Smil to prove to you otherwise.

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities, written by Vaclav Smil, published by MIT Press in September 2019 (hardback, 659 pages)

Smil, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba, has a bit of a reputation. An interview in Science introduced him as “the man who has quietly shaped how the world thinks about energy“, Foreign Policy included him in their Top 100 of Global Thinkers of 2010, and none other than Bill Gates devours his books. He has written about 40 of them – some of which are on my shelf and many more on my wishlist – but I admit with some trepidation that this is my introduction to his work. He has built a research career around energy: how we generate it, how we use it, and how it shapes our civilization. So why a book about growth? Because, as he points out, growth requires the conversion of energy.

By his own admission, a book that aims to cover such a broad topic has to be restricted in both scope and depth. Notably excluded is growth at the subcellular level, including the (epi)genetics and biochemistry of biological growth. But that leaves plenty of other topics. The first chapter introduces the reader to patterns and outcomes of growth without going into the mathematical nitty-gritty. Patterns include linear, exponential, hyperbolic, and (importantly) sigmoid or logistic growth; outcomes include normal and power-law distributions (e.g. Pareto and Zipf). The remainder of the book systematically discusses growth in living organisms, energy converters (i.e. power generators and secondary devices that use electricity), man-made artefacts (e.g. tools, buildings, infrastructure, vehicles, and electronics), and complex systems (populations, cities, empires, economies, and civilizations).

“[…] civilizations have come to rely on ever power-denser fuels, from wood to coal to oil to nuclear”

Before discussing artefacts and complex systems, Smil first gives an in-depth treatment of energy converters as “the history of civilization can be seen as a quest for ever higher reliance on extrasomatic energies“. In particular, civilizations have come to rely on ever power-denser fuels, from wood to coal to oil to nuclear. This is easily the most technical chapter of the book, rich in engineering details on the growth in both capacities and efficiencies of the machines we use to generate energy. It provides a more solid foundation than Rhodes’s book Energy, though it focuses on generation capacities rather than consumption of fuel reserves.

Biologists reading this book might feel a bit short-changed by the chapter on growth in nature. Though Smil covers growth in micro-organisms, trees, animals, and humans, much of what he discusses comes from intensely studied applied fields such as forestry, agriculture, and animal farming. There is less information about wild animals, animal populations, or ecosystems. And allometry – how shapes and proportions change with size – is only briefly mentioned when he discusses metabolic theory and expresses his scepticism of its universal applicability as promoted by e.g. Geoffrey West in his book Scale. For more on this topic see e.g. Wentworth Thompson’s classic On Growth and Form, Animal Body Size, and The Design of Mammals.

Short-changed or not, this chapter serves two important ends. First, to show the many similarities between growth in living and non-living systems. Second, to highlight that few people (especially economists) understand growth and think that anything other than organisms can grow indefinitely. These similarities are not mere curiosities and many systems show logistic growth patterns that result in a characteristic S-shaped curve when plotted. Initial slow growth gives way to rapid growth after which growth slows down and approaches an asymptotic limit. This is as true of the spread of viruses and animal or human body size as it is of the growth over time of the size of building cranes or the maximum velocities of different modes of transportation.

“[…] few people (especially economists) understand growth and think that anything other than organisms can grow indefinitely.”

But logistic growth is not universal and Smil warns of indiscriminate use of such curves to forecast growth. He explicitly bases his cautious conclusions in this book on a meticulous quantification of past observations, rather than making bold predictions. Bigger is not always better (engineers try to minimise the length of tunnels and bridges). Sometimes growth shows no particular trend and periods of stasis are followed by sudden jumps (the size of cathedrals) while civilizations can rise and fall (and rise again). Or growth can be limited by other factors such as cost (the height of skyscrapers). Some of the processes graphed here are caught in an early phase of logistic growth (the volume of internet traffic), while others show the decline that can follow afterwards (the size of the US railroad network). Reconstructing historical growth of cities, empires, and civilizations is particularly tricky. Data is patchy and proxies imperfect. Growth of empires is often measured by territory size, though most areas were only under nominal control – in practice local rulers often continued to be in charge.

I found the section on economic growth particularly revealing. Smil highlights the problems with the commonly used measure of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and alternatives, and provides an eye-opening quantification of the energy and material flows underpinning our economies. Economists tend to either take these for granted or ignore them, but, as Smil has written elsewhere, we are still living in the iron age. The widespread techno-optimism that has come with Moore’s law and the astounding advances in computing power is misplaced and he is critical of dematerialization advocates, pointing out that, in absolute terms, we are only using more of everything.

Growth is a whopper of a book: 659 pages, with a 99-page reference section. And Smil knows it: twice he refers to the “persevering reader”. Early on he warns that his systematic quantification is “unavoidably repetitive” and parts of the book are indeed somewhat dull. There is no grand theory being pushed here. But that is the whole point of the book: “grand predictions turn out to be, repeatedly, wrong”, he notes in his preface. What really characterises Smil’s attitude is caution, nuance, and scepticism. And nowhere does this show more than in his final chapter, where he ponders what comes after growth.

“There is no grand theory being pushed here. But that is the whole point of the book: “grand predictions turn out to be, repeatedly, wrong”, [Smil] notes in his preface”

Smil has, in his own words, a “respect for complex and unruly realities”. Energy and climate scientist David Keith was more outspoken by calling him a “slayer of bullshit”. Next to slamming dematerialization and perpetual growth advocates, he calls the idea of an imminent circular economy misleading (“modern economies are based on massive linear flows”), highlights the fallacy of thinking that economic growth can be decoupled from energy and material inputs (“[it] contradicts physical laws”), and considers sustainable development “one of the most misused descriptors of desirable human actions” that “leaves all key variables undefined”. But he does not side with prophets of doom either, labelling peak oil advocates “a new catastrophist cult” that “mix incontestable facts with caricatures of complex realities”.

On balance though, it is clear what camp Smil falls in. Quoting from Emmott’s book 10 Billion that “we urgently need to consume less. A lot less” shows him agreeing with the sentiments of scaling down and pulling back that Eileen Crist expressed in Abundant Earth. To arrive at this conclusion “there is no need to be a catastrophist”. The way Smil sees it “Good life within planetary boundaries is possible […] but not without fundamentally restructured provisioning systems” (more on that in my review of Planetary Accounting). And, as he points out in his conclusion to the book, we have to accept the “impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet“.

Growth is a book that, well, grows on you. Yes, reading it is a substantial investment of time, but Smil’s meticulous and cross-disciplinary approach provides many insightful ideas – of which I have mentioned only a few – that lead to a well-reasoned conclusion. And as my personal introduction to his writing, it has convinced me that I urgently need to read more of his books.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

Growth paperback, hardback, ebook, audiobook or audio CD

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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This review is one half of a two-parter. Not long after posting my review of Can Democracy Work? I received an email from Dr Roslyn Fuller: since I had mentioned her book In Defence of Democracy, would I be interested in reviewing it? This seemed like a great opportunity to also finally read Against Democracy, which has been sitting on my shelves for a while now. Two books, two opposing viewpoints, two reviews, back-to-back.

In Defence of Democracy, written by Roslyn Fuller, published by Polity in November 2019 (paperback, 216 pages)

Fuller is the director of the Solonian Democracy Institute which researches alternative democratic practices. She is particularly fascinated by Athenian democracy, the subject of her previous book Beasts and Gods, which provides valuable background reading. That book attacked current democracy, judging it to be more akin to an oligarchy, a rule of the few. So you might be confused that her next book is called In Defence of Democracy. However, Fuller is not opposed to democracy per se. In the face of a spate of recent anti-democracy books, she feels it is high time someone took a stand.

Fuller’s anti-anti-democracy arguments and solution

In Defence of Democracy is about two-thirds critique of anti-democrats, and one-third proposal for a “world you might actually want to live in“. She singles out a small group of popular books that, together with the astonishment over the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump, have fed the narrative that dumb voters make democracy a disaster. Next to Brennan’s Against Democracy, she takes aim at Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter, Achen & Bartels’s Democracy for Realists, Somin’s Democracy and Political Ignorance, and Bell’s The China Model. And, oh my, she does not mince her words.

Thus, she disarms the idea that voters would be too sexist (see Democracy for Realists) or racist (as often argued regarding the Brexit referendum). Though both affect politics, they are nothing new and nothing unique to democracy, writes Fuller. She is similarly critical of the idea that people do not know what is good for them as they do not bother to learn about politics (she calls it futility-induced ignorance, see The Myth of the Rational Voter). Or that people are just too irrational, changing their mind because of arbitrary and uncontrollable events. One spurious example she takes to court is the supposed link between shark attacks and electoral outcomes (see Democracy for Realists).

Particularly relevant to this two-part review is the argument that people are just too ignorant. She calls this obsession with people’s inability to do cold recall of political factoids “a stock trope of hyperventilating newspaper articles and panicking academics […] greeted among anti-democrats with a kind of gleeful shock horror: Look how dumb everyone is!“. Humans are quite capable of dealing with problems without completely understanding them, e.g. driving a car without being a mechanic. And (a convincing argument) humanity functions more like a hive mind when it comes to knowledge: dumb individually, but smart collectively.

“Fuller rubbishes anti-democracy arguments, but more than offering fire and fury, she has solutions of her own. Since the problem lies with the system rather than the people, we need to change the system.”

Not content to rubbish anti-democracy arguments, she then turns to the proposed solutions of these authors. One solution that receives particular attention, as it returns later in the book when discussing Athenian practices, is that of sortition. In essence, this is the use of a lottery to randomly select citizens to make up a decision-making body that could offer advice on legislation or policy, or exercise veto rights – there are different variations on this theme. One of the flaws of ideas put forward by e.g. Against Elections, says Fuller, is that the proposed bodies are far too small. This risks corruption, poor representativeness, and having one’s views “massaged” by expert panels. The Athenians did this rather differently and Fuller goes to quite some length to explain how and why this matters.

As for the other solutions, whether it would be rule by the knowledgeable, the deep state, the market, or the superior: after walking the reader through them, she concludes that the idea of the masses handing over their voting rights to a tiny minority is nothing more than thinly-veiled totalitarianism. History shows what happens when we take away rights from people “for their own good”. And she does not stop there. Her conclusion warns the reader not to fall for “a grasping, sorry, desperate fraud, offering nothing but hysteria and oppression. A narcissistic doctrine hidden behind a veneer of pompous righteousness“. It is a take-down that is as glorious as it is furious, and it certainly made me chuckle.

More than offering fire and fury, Fuller has solutions of her own. Since the problem lies with the system rather than the people, we need to change the system to incentivize people to (want to) behave differently. Inspired by the practices in ancient Athens she lays out five major principles. These are: – mass participation through online platforms (already practised in places), – paying people for participation (both as motivation and reward for the effort and time involved), – focused and outcome-oriented deliberation (to counteract the negative excesses that characterise online debate), – informal and precarious leadership (to avoid the misuse and corruption that characterise stable leadership), – and sortition done the right way. She concludes by showing how the great unwashed masses want to participate, and how her proposal addresses some of the problems the anti-democrats have with democracy.

Concerns and doubts regarding Fuller’s solution

Although Fuller has thought about her solutions more thoroughly than Brennan has in Against Democracy, I still have some nagging doubts and worries. One observation is that Athenian democracy was not all that inclusive, purposefully limiting it to male citizens. Women and slaves were excluded. Could part of the reason that Athenian democracy worked so well be that you had a rather homogenous group? Would mass participation break down with more diverse participants with opposing viewpoints? Brennan warns of polarisation of debates.

Furthermore, online debating has a bad reputation – deservedly so, I think. Both Fuller here, and Sunstein in #Republic, propose changes to make the internet a more democracy-friendly place. But even if people need to use their real name, they behave differently online than face-to-face, presenting a marked break from Athenian practices. Also, how would this online mass-participation scale up from the relatively small-scale platforms that currently exist? You cannot keep on top of people’s comments and input when the number of contributors runs in the millions.

My biggest concern, however, or perhaps it is my shortcoming, is that I do not have as much faith in my fellow citizens as Fuller does. Though she seems to take umbrage with people who have argued this, I think that the Brexit vote was an appalling example of democracy gone awry. Admittedly, I was as much galled by the campaign’s anti-immigrant undertones and utter lack of prospects (what is actually going to happen if we vote to leave?), as I was with the fact that the majority of voters fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

“[…] humans are notoriously vulnerable to psychological biases, superstitions, conspiracy theories, irrational behaviour, and plain dumbfuckery. […] Simply put, some things are just not up for a vote.”

Part of the reason I find Brennan’s knowledge argument so appealing is that humans are notoriously vulnerable to psychological biases, superstitions, conspiracy theories, irrational behaviour, and plain dumbfuckery (see a further reading list below). Regular readers of this blog will know that I can get rather fired up about this in the context of science. Particularly relevant are my reviews of Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy and The Misinformation Age which question the compatibility of science and democracy.

Simply put, some things are just not up for a vote. Take public health. If a majority thinks we should offer cancer patients the option of homeopathic treatments or abandon vaccinations over (discredited) links to autism, are we just going to let this slide because it is “the will of the people”? There are plenty of other areas where science and politics intersect and misinformation is rife (e.g. climate change or biotechnology such as genetic modification). Knowledge and expertise have their place, and even Fuller has to concede this point when she suggests on page 185 the “requirement that someone who wants to speak about a technical topic has formal qualifications in that area“. I think Brennan’s point is that this applies to many topics. Probably, she will respond that to go from here to taking away voting rights is an almighty leap. Still, to me it shows that he has laid his finger on a painful point that cannot simply be discarded out of hand either.

Conclusion: against or in defence of democracy?

Having now read both books, how do they compare? Fuller’s is certainly the easier read of the two and written with flair and gusto. Ironically, Fuller and Brennan have one thing in common: they both agree that democracy, as it is currently practised, is broken. But they diverge as to the problem and the solution. Brennan argues people are the problem, and a rule of the knowledgeable the answer. Fuller argues the system is the problem, and mass-participation the answer. It reminds me a bit of the parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant, where each blind man touches a different part of the elephant and gives a different description of it. Democracy obviously being the elephant here.

On balance, I lean more towards Fuller’s ideas, though a hybrid approach might well be needed. I do think voter ignorance is a huge problem, but, compared to the other problems Fuller highlights in Beasts and Gods, not to the extent that Brennan makes it out to be. I will agree with Brennan’s point that we should not be shy about picking whatever works best (in turn opening a whole new can of worms about metrics for this, which is another topic).

Reviewing Against Democracy and In Defence of Democracy back-to-back was an intellectually stimulating and surprisingly fun exercise. It was both interesting and mildly disconcerting to observe my own opinion on the topic swaying first in one and then another direction. This goes to show that on a topic where there are no absolutes it is a worthwhile exercise to seek out contrasting viewpoints, so I recommend both books.

Disclosure: The author provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

In Defence of Democracy paperback, hardback or ebook

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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Some recent popular science books on psychological biases and such:

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With the world in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, the questions posed by the subtitle of this book are on everyone’s mind. Associate Professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Adam Kucharski here takes the reader through the inner workings of contagion. From violence and idea to financial crises and, of course, disease – some universal rules cut right across disciplines. So, is this the most topical book of the year? Well, yes and no.

The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread – and Why They Stop, written by Adam Kucharski, published in Europe by Profile Books in March 2020 (hardback, 341 pages)

Kucharski is uniquely positioned to write a wide-ranging book like this. Next to his current position, he is trained in mathematics and did a spot of interning with a bank when the 2008 financial collapse hit. As such, he is at ease explaining both epidemiology and investment banking.

On the disease front, Kucharski covers recent outbreaks of fairly novel diseases such as Zika (which he encountered first-hand in Fiji in 2015), AIDS, Ebola, and SARS. He does not provide the full history of these the way David Quammen did in Spillover, but nevertheless gives you the relevant points in a concise form. Similarly, there is attention for some historical cases such as the miasma theory (the idea that bad air was behind diseases) and how John Snow’s work on cholera in 1850s London disproved this.

Particularly relevant to this moment in time are the epidemiological details, the titular rules of contagion. Kucharski introduces you to the SIR model, which describes how people move through three groups during a disease outbreak (Susceptible, Infectious, Recovered), how this plays into the concept of herd immunity, and how vaccination influences this. He explains the reproduction number R, its four components, abbreviated DOTS (R = Duration × Opportunities × Transmission Probability × Susceptibility), and how this explains why measures such as washing your hands and social distancing have an effect. And then there are those mysterious superspreaders which requires Kucharski to delve into network topology (the architecture of connections in a network). Having read this book, you should come away with a far better understanding of these parameters and mechanisms.

“here is the kicker of the book: these rules [of contagion] are not unique to disease outbreaks.”

But here is the kicker of the book: these rules are not unique to disease outbreaks. Ideas from public health can and have been applied to numerous other fields. This sees Kucharski branch out widely and cover a huge number of seemingly unrelated topics. His internship with a bank has given him an insider’s view of financial contagion, allowing him to clarify pyramid schemes and financial bubbles, but also how the notion of superspreaders applied to the 2008 banking crisis.

The transmission of ideas similarly follows many patterns seen in disease outbreak, although Kucharski is careful to consider ideas other than social contagion for how information spreads. His reminder of some of the psychological biases that can hinder or encourage the spread of information is a topic that will never lose its relevance. On the other side, online contagion can be encouraged by e.g. social media companies who apply epidemiological knowledge to viral marketing and the never-ending battle for your attention. This has a darker side too, ranging from echo chambers and online manipulation to the privacy concerns of many citizens about the amount and nature of data harvested by these companies.

Of course, you cannot talk about technology without touching on computer viruses, and Kucharski is equally capable of writing engagingly about computer viruses and worms, malware, botnets, DDoS attacks, or the danger of poorly secured devices that are forming the Internet of Things (see also the forthcoming Crime Dot Come and my review of Industry of Anonymity). Or what of the little-known habit of programmers to borrow pieces of code for online applications that all need to be called on, creating a vulnerable chain of dependency? This chapter might at the outset feel like a digression. But Kucharski beautifully circles back to the topic at hand by showing the parallels between virus evolution in both living and artificial systems. It is a neat writing tactic that crops up several times.

“One particular example that made me squeal with delight was how phylogenetics […] can be applied to […] the history of folk tales.”

More eye-opening for me was the long history of applying epidemiological ideas to public health. The spread of violence, riots, even suicide, can be studied and understood in this framework. One topic that made me squeal with delight was how phylogenetics (the study of evolutionary relatedness by identifying common ancestors) can be applied to a completely different field such as the history of folk tales.

From the above, it is clear that, next to disease outbreaks, The Rules of Contagion ricochets off a huge number of topics. Not all of these will interest everyone, but the enthusiasm with which Kucharski covers them is tangible, and the universal relevance of the epidemiological rules striking. Some of his metaphors are particularly lucid. Of models, he writes that they are “just a simplification of the world, designed to help us understand what might happen in a given situation […] particularly useful for questions that we can’t answer with experiments“. While of the difficulty of applying phylogenetic analysis to a slowly evolving pathogen, such as measles, he writes it is “a bit like trying to piece together a human family tree in a country where everyone has the same surname“.

“[…] of the difficulties of understanding the spread of a pathogen that evolves only slowly […] he writes it is “a bit like trying to piece together a human family tree in a country where everyone has the same surname“.”

The timing of publication of this book was uncanny, right as the COVID-19 pandemic started ramping up around the world. This presents both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, there is a sudden, huge interest in the topic of epidemiology, and the publisher has understandably been keen to emphasize this while marketing The Rules of Contagion. On the other hand, its publication in March 2020 meant that the writing for it will have finished when the pandemic was but Chinese whispers on the wind.

Given the urgency with which people now want accessible information, many will come to this book with a narrow focus of interest and might end up frustrated or disappointed with what they see as too many irrelevant asides. Some Amazon reviews suggest this has already been the case. Personally, I think this is both unfair and misses the point. One only has to look at Kucharski’s Twitter feed to see how involved he is with the ongoing pandemic. If he had finished writing it later, would it have been a different book? I would not be surprised if the paperback* will contain a new introduction or post-script. Or Kucharski might follow Quammen’s example. A year after Spillover was published he excerpted and adapted part of it at the start of the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak.

Whatever Kucharski will do next, here is a writer to keep an eye on. The Rules of Contagion is an incredibly engaging piece of cross-disciplinary popular science that will hold its relevance well beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

* Update February 2021: Having leafed through a copy of the UK paperback, I can confirm that Kucharski has chosen to update some sections of his book to reflect the events of 2020.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

The Rules of Contagion hardback, paperback, ebook or audiobook

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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Not long after posting my review of Can Democracy Work? I received an email from Dr Roslyn Fuller: since I had mentioned her book In Defence of Democracy, would I be interested in reviewing it? And so, a parcel arrived at Inquisitive Biologist HQ my living room with two books, with Beasts and Gods providing valuable background reading to In Defence of Democracy.

Many people feel disenchanted with politics, but can you really articulate why? Bar a select few politically engaged individuals I know (I am not one of them), most of us remain stuck in conspiratorial grumblings at the pub about corrupt politicians. Published in 2015, Beasts and Gods lays bare how modern democracies are invariably broken, examines democracy in ancient Athens, and asks what we can learn from them.

Beasts and Gods: How Democracy Changed its Meaning and Lost its Purpose, written by Roslyn Fuller, published by Zed Books in November 2015 (paperback, 414 pages)

Fuller is the director of the Solonian Democracy Institute which researches alternative democratic practices. She is particularly fascinated by Athenian democracy. After all, they invented this whole democracy thing – the ancient Greek word demokratia means people power. Though you might be surprised just how much their ideas and practices differed from ours.

When we say “democracy”, we tend to think of elections. The Athenians ended up ditching these in favour of taking all decisions by themselves. Astonishingly, assembly meetings, which formed the heart of Athenian democracy, were typically attended by a constantly rotating cast of 5000-6000 people, some 10-20% of the eligible population. And these meetings were not an occasional but a weekly occurrence where anyone could speak to the assembled to put forth their ideas. There were officials to keep this and other processes running, but they were appointed annually at random by a glorified Lotto machine, a cleroterion, complete with coloured balls. The best part? Because frequent mass participation was obviously a time consuming though highly valued activity, people were paid for their participation. Seems crazy? Perhaps, says Fuller, but it worked.

Now look at us, she writes. What we call “representative democracy”, where we elect politicians to make decisions for us, is, at best, a symbolic democracy, but more often closer to an oligarchy, a rule of the few.

“When we say “democracy”, we tend to think of elections. The Athenians ended up ditching these in favour of taking all decisions by themselves.”

First, take that “representative” part. Every vote counts, right? Sure, but as Fuller shows, not every vote matters. And this is especially true of the electoral system known as first-past-the-post voting, used in the US, the UK, Canada, and India. She shows how votes can be wasted. How the way they are totted up per district often results in a disconnect between the actual number of votes a political party receives overall (the popular vote) and how seats in a parliament are allotted, meaning parties that lose the popular vote can still win elections. And how politicians are actively gaming the system by manipulating the boundaries of voting districts through the practice of gerrymandering (for those interested, CGP Grey did a great series of explanatory videos on this). Other democratic voting systems (single transferable vote and several proportional voting systems) examined here are less inaccurate but still imperfect: the number of elected politicians is simply too small to accurately reflect the population. And that is just the beginning.

A large part of the book goes on to show that this small number of politicians has another drawback: it offers a multi-faceted pressure point for those with money. Political campaigns are largely financed by corporate backers in return for favours: favourable tax regimes, lax environmental or public health regulations – you do not have to look hard for scandals. And what of participatory tools for the average voter such as petitions, protests, or visits and letters to representatives? Next to a readily-ignored facade, they are drowned out by corporate interests. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs)? Bar your Oxfam or Greenpeace who do genuine good, most are, in Fuller’s words, umbrella organisations for corporate interests or privately funded think tanks, offering another channel for the wealthy to lobby and influence governments.

“The disproportionate influence of wealth extends further up still into international spheres, to the point that “private financiers [can] reduce whole nations to a condition not much different to indentured servitude“”

This disproportionate influence of wealth extends further up still into international spheres. The United Nations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank were formed to stabilise the global economy after two world wars and an economic depression. But their imperfect implementation has generated another lever for vested interests to influence who gets international loans and what strings are attached to them, to the point that “private financiers [can] reduce whole nations to a condition not much different to indentured servitude“.

And so we have ended up with a system where money begets power, and power begets money, resulting in increasing economic inequality and a disenfranchised electorate that is given the “privilege” of token votes in elections. You will probably have heard people grumble along these lines or grumble along those lines yourself. Even so, my usual response used to be one of: “Really? That sounds very cynical and borderline conspiracy theory”.

The power of Beasts and Gods is twofold here. First, in plain English devoid of hyperbole, it clarifies that the situation is indeed as bad as it seems. But more importantly, it proposes solutions, specifically by re-examining Athenian democracy. Though there are aspects we would not want to emulate in our times (only men with Athenian citizenship were allowed to participate, for example), their system had a key benefit. Mass participation meant that power was too diffuse to be bought by the wealthy. But how would mass-participation work when countries now have tens to hundreds of millions of voters?

“We have ended up with a system where money begets power, and power begets money, resulting in increasing economic inequality and a disenfranchised electorate that is given the “privilege” of token votes in elections.”

Fuller envisions a digital democracy where the internet would enable everyone to participate, and she provides examples of existing initiatives of participatory budgeting and online citizens’ assemblies to show how this is already happening. Part of me reflexively responds by linking to Mark Manson’s essay The World Is Fucked and I’m Pretty Sure It’s the Internet’s Fault whose sharp observation that “when you give the average person an infinite reservoir of human wisdom, they will not Google for the higher truth that contradicts their own convictions” puts a damper on this kind of online optimism. But maybe it is me who is too cynical now – let’s not beat it until we have tried it, it cannot be worse than what we have now.

Fuller sees two major obstacles: mass media and economic inequality. The former are currently in the deep pockets of those same vested interests, in case you were wondering where some of the money goes. And Fuller refers to the perhaps unsurprising research that shows just how easily people’s opinions can be influenced by simply repeating a message often enough. The latter can be overcome by enforcing existing tax laws and by capping people’s income. I mean, how much money do you need? One further obstacle that occurred to me, but that is not addressed here: existing laws. None of this will be easy or quick. But, Fuller reminds us, the Athenians did not invent their democracy overnight either. The alternative, as became apparent when I reviewed The Great Leveler, is that it ends in tears when bloody wars or insurrections level the playing field.

Beasts and Gods is a pleasantly accessible book, even when, like myself, you are not well versed in politics and economics. Fuller injects her writing with a welcome dose of wit and strident attitude to prevent this from being a boring or dry read. More importantly, she provides solutions. Having just shown how broken democracy currently is, you might be surprised she nevertheless defends it. For that, see my review of In Defence of Democracy.

Disclosure: The author provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.Beasts and Gods paperback, hardback or ebook

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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I have written on this blog before that the Internet is not everything it is cracked up to be. Here I will add another string to that bow: crime. Spam, scams, malware, keyloggers, viruses, hacking, identity theft, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, stolen credit card details… the list goes on. Just as its offline counterpart, cybercrime encompasses a diverse array of misdeeds. But where its victims, both personal and corporate, regularly make headlines, the perpetrators remain a mysterious bunch. Based on a huge number of interviews, sociologist Jonathan Lusthaus here provides a peek behind that veil of anonymity. Next to showing that cybercrime has become an industry like any other, he also explores the paradox at its heart: how did this growth happen in an environment of mistrust and anonymity?

Industry of Anonymity: Inside the Business of Cybercrime, written by Jonathan Lusthaus, published by Harvard University Press in November 2018 (hardback, 280 pages)

Lusthaus spends part of his first chapter, and the methodological appendix referenced therein, both explaining and defending his methodology. Although quantitative research is generally the preferred way to address research questions, he points out that the statistics on cybercrime are very scant. This book should, therefore, be seen as a first peek into the world of cybercrime on which future studies might hopefully build.

Lusthaus’s approach is no less impressive for it. Based on 238 interviews conducted over seven years with both current and former cybercriminals, cybersecurity experts, law enforcement agents, lawyers, civil servants, journalists, and many others, as well as published accounts, archived websites, chat logs, and legal documents, Lusthaus goes deep down the rabbit hole. The research involved going to cybercrime hotspots in Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Nigeria, Brazil, China, and other places to interview people in person. The blurb on the dustjacket bigs this up quite a bit, but this book is no memoir of Lusthaus’s adventures, staying firmly within the confines of an academic sociological treatise.

“Based on 238 interviews conducted over seven years, Lusthaus goes deep down the rabbit hole of cybercrime”

The aim of Industry of Anonymity is two-fold: to show that cybercrime has become a sophisticated, for-profit industry, and to understand how this could have happened in an environment riven with anonymity and distrust. That second question very much follows on from the first point, for the growth in cybercrime is not just more of the same – there has been a genuine change in complexity, scale, and organisation.

Though popular imagination still portrays hackers as lone-wolf teenagers working from their bedrooms, reality is different. Starting with a brief history of hacking, Lusthaus shortly chronicles the rise of carder forums, where stolen credit card details were being traded, and the series of crackdowns and arrests that fragmented and decentralised the cybercrime world, forcing it deeper into anonymity. What I found particularly eye-opening in these first two chapters was the evidence and testimony Lusthaus gathers of cybercriminals with specialised skill sets cooperating like cogs in a larger machine, sometimes loosely organising themselves in real-world, offline firms complete with physical premises masquerading as technology companies, while at other times plying their services in underground online forums.

“cybercrime has become a sophisticated, for-profit industry,  [it] is not just more of the same – there has been a genuine change in complexity, scale, and organisation.”

This feeds into the remaining core of four chapters of the book, where Lusthaus explores how this rise in complexity has taken place in an anonymous environment. Nicknames are argued to function as a brand, with a tension between building up a reputation and the risk of eventually being unmasked by law enforcement. Offline, real-world violence in the form of abduction, beatings, or even murder discourages backstabbing amongst criminals. Cybercriminals – anonymous and often operating in different countries – have less to fear in this regard, so a certain amount of defection is almost taken for granted by the people Lusthaus interviewed. But he shows that there are strategies to prevent this, revolving around reputation, exclusion from forums, and the use of escrow services: third-party intermediaries in a deal.

Given the above it may come as a surprise that some cybercriminals give up their anonymity and reveal their identity to fellow criminals, sometimes even meeting them in person. As with nicknames, Lusthaus shows the tension between the benefits and drawbacks that anonymity brings in this environment, and how there are different pathways to success. Finally, another reason cybercrime has flourished is that it is being protected. Lusthaus breaks with the popular narrative that organised crime is taking over cybercrime. Although they have a role to play in it, Lusthaus contends that government corruption is a more powerful factor that prevents cybercriminals from being brought to justice. This seems to be especially true in Eastern Europe and Russia.

“it may come as a surprise that some cybercriminals give up their anonymity and reveal their identity to fellow criminals […] As with nicknames, [there is a] tension between the benefits and drawbacks that anonymity brings.”

Industry of Anonymity is a well-structured book that benefits from helpful summaries at the end of each chapter. It is not intended as a broad introduction to cybercrime, though, but has a particular, well-outlined focus. Lusthaus does not discuss the technical details of cyberattacks (other than a short explanation of what certain attacks entail), nor does he talk to victims. In contrast to previous popular accounts (next to Kingpin and DarkMarket, Lusthaus prominently mentions and draws from Fatal System Error and Spam Nation) this book aims to be a broader and more current survey. According to Lusthaus, the former have mostly been US or Europe-centric, focused on particular cases, and often have not looked beyond the 2000s when the drive for profit took over. Similarly, though the book provides plenty of colour in the form of passages from interviews (often faithfully transmitted here in the broken English of the participants) and the examples drawn from popular accounts, Lusthaus’s book is foremost an academic treatise. That said, for readers interested in sociology, criminology, or cybercrime, this book is a very valuable survey based on an incredible amount of work and perseverance.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

Industry of Anonymity hardback, ebook, audiobook, audio CD or MP3 CD

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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There is an amusing and slightly acerbic acronym that has stuck with me from my days working at a computer helpdesk for an international oil firm: PICNIC. Short for “problem in chair, not in computer”, my colleagues used it as code whenever an employee rocked up at our helpdesk with a complaint or problem that was due to human clumsiness rather than malfunctioning hardware. “Did you check that the printer was plugged into the power socket?”

Nevertheless, says Artificial Intelligence (AI) researcher Robert Elliott Smith, our blind faith in computers and the algorithms that run them is misguided. Based on his 30 years experience working with AI, the aptly titled Rage Inside the Machine takes the reader on a historical tour of computing to show how today’s technology is both less amoral and more prejudiced than we give it credit for.

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All, written by Robert Elliott Smith, published by Bloomsbury Business (a Bloomsbury Publishing imprint) in June 2019 (hardback, 344 pages)

At their silicon hearts, computers are just big number crunchers. This has led to the tacit assumption that computers are rational machines that cannot possibly be biased, as opposed to humans. But this, says Smith, is a mistake. The theories and findings that gave rise to today’s algorithms go back several centuries and are products of their times, and this historical context is often ignored in contemporary discussions. A large part of Rage Inside the Machine, therefore, is a trip down memory lane.

The first historical vignette goes back all the way to 1290 when Christian scholar Ramon Llull tried to make a mechanical device that would give irrefutable proof that Christianity was the one true faith. Goofy as this may now sound, it did lead him to write about the mathematical subdiscipline of combinatorics, which in turn influenced scholars and philosophers centuries down the line. Combinatorics is quite simply the study of how many possible combinations you can make with a given number of component parts. What it reveals about reality is that extremely complex problems – ones that are easy to describe but hard to solve – are actually surprisingly common. The travelling salesman problem is probably the most well-known example of a problem where the number of possible solutions rapidly balloons. Thus, to provide us with answers, algorithms simplify real-world processes and are by their very nature reductionist.

With that firmly in mind, Smith proceeds to look at the historical antecedents of various facets underpinning AI, with the occasional foray into equations and Venn diagrams. He thus discusses the history behind probability theory, which is the mathematical modelling that uses statistics to analyse complex data. And he shows how Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was rapidly appropriated and applied to social contexts. When combined with Friedrich Gauss’s concept of the bell curve (a graph that shows the dispersion of data either side of an average value), it was used as justification for eugenic practices aimed at the betterment of the human race by eliminating statistical outliers.

“[…] to provide us with answers, algorithms simplify real-world processes and are by their very nature reductionist.”

One of the most notorious tools that came out of this form of social Darwinism, which is still with us today, is the intelligence quotient (IQ) test. It has been used to prop up racism and sexism for decades. Less well-known is that other statistical tools had equally less salubrious origins, with links to both eugenics and mental asylums (the name Karl Pearson might ring a bell from your statistics classes).

The current fears that AI will soon make large swathes of humanity unemployable (also see CGP Grey’s excellent video Humans Need Not Apply) is an echo of what happened when the Industrial Revolution replaced the cottage industry with factories. Conversely, the notion that you can increase efficiency by dividing labour influenced how humans did complex computations before technology could help out – it led to groups of skilled people in computing factories breaking down the task into bite-sized chunks.

“The current fears that AI will soon make large swathes of humanity unemployable […] is an echo of what happened when the Industrial Revolution replaced the cottage industry with factories”

Other important figures that feature in Smith’s story are Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, and Noam Chomsky. Turing, and the test named after him, gave rise to the idea that the brain is just a computer. Shannon’s information theory underlies all electronic communication today. And Chomsky studied human language, particularly its syntax, and his contributions are still relevant to the current struggle of algorithms to really understand human language with all its subtleties. Ironically, much discussion on AI is muddled by the language we use to describe what algorithms are doing, resulting in wishful mnemonics: the naming of computational phenomena with words denoting human characteristics and capabilities. “Does Google’s AlphaGo programme really intuitively decide on its next move when playing Go?”, asks Smith.

Throughout his book, Smith links the historical material back to current concerns around AI. One of the take-away messages that he repeatedly hammers home is that the assumptions and simplifications we have built into our algorithms are wedded to historical prejudices and baggage. And by their very nature as relentless optimisers, algorithms will reinforce these and feed them back to us, as examples of racist and misogynist AI bloopers show.

Still, as the book progresses, I increasingly felt Smith went a bit off-script. I think the book’s subtitle initially put me on a wrong footing and led to me expecting more social commentary and less history. There were certain points in the book where I wondered “what does this have to do with current concerns about social networks?” One example is when he writes of his work for aerospace company McDonnell Douglas. Here he trained genetic algorithms, which mimic evolution to find better solutions, to learn the fighter jet maneuvres of top-gun pilots. Though, to his credit, those same genetic algorithms can help us understand how social network architecture leads to the self-reinforcing filter bubbles that have become a grave concern (but see the critique Are Filter Bubbles Real?).

“While Silicon Valley is awash in dreams of the coming Singularity […] Smith sees a far more immediate problem in the unholy trinity of scientism, computation, and commercialism.”

Together with books such as The AI Delusion and Rebooting AI, Smith clearly falls in Camp Cautious. While Silicon Valley is awash in dreams of the coming Singularity, when AI will eclipse human intelligence, Smith argues that beyond computers having become more numerous, powerful, and connected, not much has changed. I would add that the maxim “garbage in, garbage out” still stands firmly. Rather than the future existential threat of AI that some fear, Smith sees a far more immediate problem in what he calls the unholy trinity of scientism, computation, and commercialism. We obliviously trust the powerful algorithms employed by large firms such as Facebook that have penetrated every nook and cranny of our everyday lives. And it is easy to forget they have but one objective: maximize profit. And that, argues Smith, is far more dangerous to humankind than nightmarish visions of the robot apocalypse.

So, how can we stop the internet making bigots of us all? Smith is not outspokenly prescriptive, though his work on evolutionary algorithms suggests we can create a different kind of beast, a breed of diversity-preserving algorithms rather than the relentless optimizers underlying current online social networks. Instead, the goal of this book is foremost to educate readers, to arm them with a better understanding of how algorithms work by simplifying reality, and to raise awareness of how their inner workings betray the past prejudices that are still baked into them. To that end, Smith presents a very pleasant and accessible mix of revealing history, personal anecdotes, and sharp observations.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

Rage Inside the Machine hardback or ebook

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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Checking the weather forecast is like flushing your toilet. A banal activity we all engage in a few times a day. But does anyone of us really know what goes into making it? Andrew Blum is fascinated by infrastructures. His previous book Tubes explored the physical infrastructure that keeps the internet running. Here he delves into the infrastructure that enables weather predictions. Most of us might have an inkling it involves satellites and computer models, but that does not begin to describe the globe-spanning collaborative network that hides under the bonnet.

The Weather Machine: How We See Into the Future, written by Andrew Blum, published in Europe by The Bodley Head (a Vintage imprint) in June 2019 (hardback, 207 pages)

Blum’s particular mission statement does have one corollary: the weather itself is almost absent from this book. If you are interested in the basics of weather patterns, where rain comes from, how storms develop, what the deal is with areas of high and low pressure, etc. you will have to look elsewhere. Of course, seeing how big of a topic meteorology is, this omission is understandable.

For this book, Blum takes the opening of the first telegraph line in the USA in 1844 as the starting point of his history of modern meteorology. Their sensitivity to foul weather and the instantaneous exchange of information meant its operators were the first to collect weather observations over larger areas. With it came the almost spontaneous realisation that weather was not a local phenomenon, but moved across the country.

From these early beginnings, Blum introduces one of the founding fathers of weather modelling, the Norwegian Vilhelm Bjerknes. His work at the turn of the 19th century is still relevant today, underlying our current models. Visions of a “forecast factory” filled with humans working in parallel to compute weather patterns were floated, but the reality lagged behind. The manual calculations were too time-consuming to be of practical use and there was a chronic lack of observations to do the calculations with.

“Visions of a “forecast factory” filled with humans working in parallel to compute weather patterns were floated, but the reality lagged behind.”

Though this first part of the book makes for fascinating reading, a moment’s reflection suggests that it is somewhat lacking in its coverage. A pioneer such as Francis Beaufort – he of the wind scale – is barely mentioned. The deeper history of weather observations and early instruments, before the 1800s, is left out. The humble weather balloon, which is still let up in droves to this day, receives scant mention. And what of the ubiquitous weather station?

Delving into Bjerknes’s history entails a trip to Norway, where Blum visits the island of Utsira, home to one the nation’s oldest weather stations. His reporting here is full of atmosphere but surprisingly thin on factual information. What instruments do you actually find in a modern ground-based weather station? What do they measure, and how? How have they changed over time? Blum remains vague on the specifics and interested readers might want to consult e.g. Setting Up a Weather Station and Understanding the Weather or the more in-depth The Weather Observer’s Handbook.

“[…] models have grown in complexity and power to the point we have virtual models of the planet that produce reliable forecasts a week into the future.”

Fortunately, the book hits its stride when Blum moves on to the invention of both rocket technology in the wake of World War II, and the satellite technology of the Cold War. As with many scientific disciplines, war and military funding provided much of the impetus for technological development. This seems a topic closer to Blum’s heart, and he explores the different types of satellites, the logistical challenge of updating and moving around this space fleet, and the different agencies responsible for this. Despite living in Europe myself, I was previously only familiar with the US agency NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) but not its European counterpart EUMETSAT (the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites). Blum visits the German headquarters, witnessing data collection from a satellite in action, while back in the US, he travels to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to marvel at a new type of satellite to measure soil moisture, but misses out on the launch due to (ironically) bad weather.

The final stretch of reportage sees Blum delve into the weather models and forecasts. As also argued in A Vast Machine, data and models go hand in hand. With increasing amounts of data from all corners and layers of the globe, models have grown in complexity and power to the point that we have virtual models of the planet that produce reliable forecasts a week into the future.

“Meteorology seems to be one of the few areas where nations put aside their differences to work towards a greater good […]”

In the US, Blum talks to scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), while in Europe he visits the undisputed leader in this field, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF). The latter is an especially fascinating organisation, both in the way it is run, as what it is running on (some of the world’s fastest supercomputers). Lastly, there is The Weather Company in the US who provides forecasts-on-demand over the internet to all the major players (Google, Facebook etc.) and has become increasingly reliant on models over humans.

Alongside all the gadgetry, Blum takes the time for interesting reflections. I mentioned the continued entanglement of military and meteorological interests. But more importantly, there is the continuous cooperation between all of the world’s countries. Meteorology seems to be one of the few areas where nations put aside their differences to work towards a greater good without any financial gain involved. Even so, the increasingly expensive and complicated infrastructure sees power and knowledge becoming concentrated in the hands of fewer players. Entirely different developments that have meteorologists scratching their heads are the spectres of both crowd-sourced and private data in the hands of large technology corporations seeking to profiteer from it.

Overall, I think The Weather Machine is somewhat lacking when it comes to the early history of meteorology but hits its stride when it gets to the satellite era and beyond. Blum features a pleasant mix of accessible information with on-the-ground interviews and impressions, and I breezed through this book in a day. If like me, you know little about modern meteorology, this absorbing book provides a fascinating glimpse into a world largely hidden from view. But do not be surprised if new questions arise after reading this book.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

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