Digital Is Destroying Everything: What the Tech Giants Won't Tell You about How Robots, Big Data, and Algorithms Are Radically Remaking Your Future

Description

Every year, perhaps even every week, there is some new gadget, device, service, or other digital offering intended to make our lives easier, better, more fun, or more instantaneous--making it that much harder to question how anything digital can be bad for us. Digital has created some wonderful things and we can hardly imagine life without them. But digital—the most relentless social and economic juggernaut humanity has unleashed in centuries—is also destroying much we had taken for granted. And what is your place in this brave new world?In Digital Is Destroying Everything, futurist and digital marketing consultant Andrew Edwards tours the “blasted heath” digital is leaving behind and takes a fearless look at the troubled landscape that may lie ahead. The book is not, despite its title, a dystopian rant against all things digital and technological. Instead, expect to find a lively investigation into the ways digital has opened us to new and sometimes quite wonderful experiences, driven down costs for consumers, and given information a chance to be free. But the book also takes a clear-eyed look at many of the good (and sometimes bad) things—businesses and behaviors—digital has destroyed, and how the world may be diminished, compromised, and altered forever in its wake. This tour of the effects of digital technologies on our lives is sure to raise questions, touch a nerve, and enlighten even the most dedicated digital enthusiasts.Digital has created some wonderful things and we can hardly imagine life without them. But digital—the most relentless social and economic juggernaut humanity has unleashed in centuries—is also destroying much we had taken for granted. And what is your place in this brave new world?In Digital Is Destroying Everything, futurist and digital marketing consultant Andrew Edwards tours the “blasted heath” digital is leaving behind and takes a fearless look at the troubled landscape that may lie ahead. The book is not, despite its title, a dystopian rant against all things digital and technological. Instead, expect to find a lively investigation into the ways digital has opened us to new and sometimes quite wonderful experiences, driven down costs for consumers, and given information a chance to be free. But the book also takes a clear-eyed look at many of the good (and sometimes bad) things—businesses and behaviors—digital has destroyed, and how the world may be diminished, compromised, and altered forever in its wake. This tour of the effects of digital technologies on our lives is sure to raise questions, touch a nerve, and enlighten even the most dedicated digital enthusiasts. Contents Foreword A Note on the Use of the Word “Digital” in This Book 1 Digital Is Destroying Everything 2 Crazy Train: How Digital Drove Big Music Off the Rails 3 The Bezos Bauble: Digital Is Destroying the Newspaper Industry 4 The Business Case, or, When Digital Destroys Digital 5 Undigital, Unemployed: Digital Is Destroying the Job Market 6 The Lonely Screen: Digital Is Destroying Human Interaction 7 A Golden Ring, Just Out of Reach: Digital Is Destroying Higher Education 8 The Downtown Next Time: Digital Is Destroying Urban Life in America 9 Oversharing and Undercounting: Digital Is Destroying Rational Discourse and the Democratic Process 10 Books, Bath, and Beyond: Digital Is Destroying Retail 11 B2B and the Perils of Freemium: Digital Is Destroying the Business-to-Business Market for Digital 12 Digital Has Destroyed Authoritarian Rule (or Has It?) 13 Obsessive Compulsive: Digital Is Destroying Our Will to Create Anything Not Digital 14 Wall Street as Vaudeville: Digital Is Destroying Financial Services 15 Invaders from Earth: Digital Is Destroying the Professions (and More) 16 From Rubylith to Selfies: Lesser Pursuits Destroyed by Digital 17 It’s Worse Than You Thought: Digital Is Destroying Privacy 18 Maybe It’s All Bullshit 19 Don’t Read This First: Surviving and Prospering in a Digital Future Notes Index