Cory Doctorow

The Big Tech firms are dividing the world between them

The internet has left every aspect of our lives dependent on a fearsome, impersonal oligarchy, says James Ball

[Getty Images]

To look upon a freshly painted wall is to behold a smooth surface; to look at it through a magnifier is to see a rough and irregular landscape — but turn the magnification up sufficiently and see it become regular again, a geometric matrix of atoms held in molecular bonds. Keep magnifying and you enter the unimaginably messy realm of the subatomic, a weird place of eldritch geometries and smeared-out, probabilistic motion.

The world is smooth and rough, orderly and messy, all at once, depending on how closely you look. In The System, the journalist James Ball — a veteran of both WikiLeaks and the Guardian’s original Snowden team — peers at the internet at a variety of magnifications, starting with the physical wires and data centres, moving up the stack through the protocols and the governance mechanisms; the businesses and the businesses that enable the businesses; the surveillance operators and the regulators; and, finally, the loyal opposition — the civil society groups that dream about how wonderful it might be even as they live with the daily nightmare of how terrible it’s all becoming.

Ball’s storytelling mode is familiar to anyone who enjoys ‘narrative non-fiction’ — leavening the necessarily technical exposition about how all this stuff works with personal profiles of the people doing the work. He is a sprightly writer and a master explainer who does very well on the technical side, and he’s also a canny enough observer of the world that he steers clear of the pitfall of lionising his subjects, making heroic titans of them. Instead, he holds them up as examples, just one out of an army of similarly situated people who could be swapped in. He doesn’t want us to think of this as a clash of personal wills and personalities but, rather, as a system (hence the title), where, yes, named human beings take decisions of enormous import to billions, but whose overall freedom of motion is constrained by vast and impersonal forces.

We are barrelling towards a future where the Big Tech firms will divide the world between them

The internet touches every facet of our lives and every one of the chapters in this book covers an entire specialist degree’s worth of ground, so the detail we get is more representative than comprehensive.

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