Data Love and Internet Hell

I have the lead essay (“Internet of Stings”) in the Dec. 2nd Times Literary Supplement, writing about four books that lay out the risks (and a few of the rewards) of the way we live online:

“In this post-factual, truth-averse era, many of the destinations that draw us online have become unsafe spaces, hostile and treacherous, where hatefulness and fake news prevail and surveillance is omnipresent. The web has changed, and it has changed us.”

The most sensationalistic of the four books, Marc Goodman’s Future Crimes, is a catalog of vulnerabilities and will probably make you want to unplug all your smart devices and go off the grid entirely. But the most thought-provoking of the four, for me, is Roberto Simanowski’s Data Love: The Seduction and Betrayal of Digital Technologies (Columbia U. Press):

“One needs to ask why people as citizens insist on a private sphere that they blithely ignore as consumers”, he writes. “Data love – our love for data and its love for us – is the embrace that hardly anyone in this day and age can avoid.”

If podcasts are your thing, you can hear me talking about data love and internet risk with TLS editor Stig Abell and commissioning editor Thea Lenarduzzi on “TLS Voices.”