Review: Data Politics – Worlds, Subjects, Rights edited by Didier Bigo, Engin Isin, and Evelyn Ruppert

6 Star Top 10%, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology

Didier Bigo, Engin Isin, Evelyn Ruppert (eds._

6 Star — A pioneeering panorama

Take the time to look at the Table of Contents using Amazon's Look Inside! feature. This is a remarkable book, both comprehensible at the undergraduate or citizen lay level, and a foundation for advanced studies.

I find this book absorbing in every respect. Part I covers the pernicious impact of algorithms and surveillance capitalism, and touches on the reality that “knowledge” is under siege, which is to say, data integrity at the micro and macro levels has vanished, while personal privacy at the micro and macro levels has also vanished.

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Review (Guest): Google Archipelago – The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom

5 Star, Crime (Corporate), Information Society, Information Technology

5 Star – Deep Look at New Form of Tyranny

Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom begins with familiar cultural politics as points of entry to the book's theme regarding the reach, penetration, and soon the ubiquity of the digital world. In a book about enormous sea changes brought about by digital technology, Google Archipelago begins and ends with the political, in particular with the objectives of the Big Digi­tal conglomerates as global corporate monopoly capitalists or would-be-monopolies.

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Review: [Time-Based Two-Man Detect & React] Analogue Network Security by Winn Schwartau

6 Star Top 10%, Complexity & Resilience, Crime (Corporate), Economics, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology
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Winn Schwartau

6 Stars – Foundation for IT & Web 3.0 Security

This book is critical to the post-Western Web 3.0 new Internet and should be translated into Chinese and Russian as soon as possible.

This is a Nobel-level piece of work that provides everything that Vint Cerf and Tim Berner-Lee failed to plan for. It exposes the IT industry for the insecure naked posturing ponzi scheme that it is.

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Review: Augmented Intelligence – Smart Systems and the Future of Work and Learning

5 Star, Economics, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public)

Daniel Araya (editor)

5 Stars Best Available Overview, Most “Experts” Still in Denial

Augmented Intelligence is the new meme that goes beyond Collective Intelligence. The editor has done the best possible job of collecting inputs from top people, a few of whom I know such as Jim Spohrer, and I recommend the book without reservation. Certainly it is my hope that the editor will be recognized as a rising star and given the freedom to do more outreach to include travel including China, toward what I hope will be a more multinational follow-on book.

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Review: Explosive Growth – A Few Things I Learned While Growing To 100 Million Users – And Losing $78 Million

5 Star, Information Technology, Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks)
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Cliff Lerner

5 Star Combines Lessons with Reading Recommendations

I'm starting to think about how to spend $200M to create an alternative to #GoogleGestapo that connects the President to 200 million eligible voters, and this book jumped to the top of the pile.

It is a fast pleasant read and it delivers both the expected lessons and an unexpected bonus, a very fine integrated list of books he read and gathered lessons from. I've read most of them but it was — for those who do not read as much as I do — a fine added value.

Here are a few items that stood out:

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Review: Life After Google – The Fall Of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

3 Star, Information Society, Information Technology
Amazon Page

George Gilder

3 Stars Fad Book Limited Value

I gave up on this book after 100 pages (it is 320 pages long). I normally do not waste time writing negative reviews  but in this instance think it appropriate to mention that I found it wanting.

The first third, on Google, is so far-fetched in its effusive praise and its articulation of the Google this and Google that I could not get the image out of my head: George Gilder kissing Eric Schmidt's ass.  Over and over and over again.

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Review: When Google Met WikiLeaks

6 Star Top 10%, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Future, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology, Intelligence (Public), Misinformation & Propaganda, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
Amazon Page

It has been very distressful for me, as a professional intelligence officer committed to truth and transparency, to find so many of my colleagues absolutely livid – constipated with anger, impotent in every sense of the word – when confronted with the success off WikiLeaks.

Julian Assange is the epitome of truth, transparency, and trust, the sub-title of The Open Source Everything Manifesto that places Julian and the good works of his thousands of volunteers in context. The post-Western, post-Google Internet begins and ends, in my view, with Julian Assange, myself, William Binney, and John McAfee. The WikiLeaks “model” – while it can be broadened and scaled up – is the perfect manifestation of what Tom Atlee has called The Tao of Democracy. WikiLeaks is Collective Intelligence in its purest form: no barriers, no lies.

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