Book Review: "Meganets", by David B. Auerbach

Who is really responsible for our behavior online? Nobody, says David Auerbach in "Meganets".

"Just a word. Are you listening?" Mr. Maguire told Ben Braddock in "The Graduate" (1967). "Plastics."

Twenty-five years later, a French horn player warned me, a literature student who had not yet email address, that the future was in something called "hyperlinks".

Now here comes David B. Auerbach with a new piece of slang, and a book , for our rapidly changing times: "Meganets". It's a tough term that a few companies, including a communications provider and a sprinkler system, have already claimed. (I discovered this, of course, on Google, which, along with Microsoft, once employed Auerbach as a software engineer.) But his definition of "meganet" is essentially a big mass of lethal, computational power, a "man-machine behemoth." . controlled by anyone. If the internet is fictional doctor and scientist Bruce Banner, stealthy and a little troubled but basically benign, the Meganets are the Incredible Hulks, surly and out of control.

About the concept competitor to the metaverse, the vision of an imminent, investable digital world that has been on everyone's lips, but especially on the lips of Mark Zuckerberg, Auerbach is a little wavy in the hand, calling it "terribly vague." And besides, nothing so new. "Aren't we already socializing, playing and working in an overly immersive online world?" he writes. "This world may not be 'The Matrix', but all the connecting fabric is already here."

With all the literature on "unplugging" or learning "How to Do Nothing," as Jenny Odell titled her flowery bestseller of 2019, "Meganets" made me feel deeply uneasy about how much time I spend on Instagram, Reddit, TikTok and Twitter Not Facebook, never Facebook - "a source of misinformation", as Auerbach calls it, "a petri dish in which false facts and crazy theories grow, mutate, and metastasize" - except for the burner account that I occasionally use to see what exes are up to.

When my small "private" Instagram account was hacked last year by an enterprising bitcoin entrepreneur in a distant land, I went into complete panic - especially after an anonymous entity of Insta asked and then rejected a series of slow motion video selfies, even tilting their heads to the ceiling, to verify my account.

< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Was this the experience of a validation addict in withdrawal? No, let's reframe: I was trapped in a meganet (especially now that Facebook's parent company Meta owns Insta): a middle-aged siren struggling in the great online ocean as data floated around me, multiplying like plankton.

A Gen Xer might just feel at sea too in Auerbach's lengthy chapter on cryptocurrency. “Reality bites,” we naively thought, but here “reality forks,” with the blockchain folding in on itself like a caterpillar. >

Auerbach is as comfortable with literature and philosophy as he is in the engine room, quoting Kenneth Burke, George Trow and Shakespeare (in a discussion of the inability of intelligence to determine the authorship of the Elizabethan play "Arden of Faversham"). "I've waited over five years for Amazon to notify me of the availability of a copy of Grigol Robakidze's novel 'The Snake's Skin'," he wrote, "supposedly published in 2015" - that would be.. .