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Meganets: How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities
How the autonomous digital forces jolting our lives – as uncontrollable as the weather and plate tectonics – are transforming life, society, culture, and politics.
David Auerbach’s exploration of the phenomenon he has identified as the meganet begins with a simple, startling There is no hand on the tiller of some of the largest global digital forces that influence our daily from corporate sites such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, YouTube, Instagram, and Reddit to the burgeoning metaverse encompassing cryptocurrencies and online gaming to government systems such as China’s Social Credit System and India’s Aadhaar.
As we increasingly integrate our society, culture and politics within a hyper-networked fabric, Auerbach explains how the interactions of billions of people with unfathomably large online networks have produced a new sort of ever-changing systems that operate beyond the control of the individuals, companies, and governments that created them.
Meganets, Auerbach explains, have a life of their own, actively resisting attempts to control them as they accumulate data and produce spontaneous, unexpected social groups and uprisings that could not have even existed twenty years ago. And they constantly modify themselves in response to user behavior, resulting in collectively authored algorithms none of us intend or control. These enormous invisible organisms exerting great force on our lives are the new minds of the world, increasingly commandeering our daily lives and inner realities.
Auerbach’s analysis of these gargantuan opaque digital forces yield important insights such Auerbach then comes full circle, showing that while we cannot ultimately control meganets we can tame them through the counterintuitive measures he describes in detail.
David Auerbach’s exploration of the phenomenon he has identified as the meganet begins with a simple, startling There is no hand on the tiller of some of the largest global digital forces that influence our daily from corporate sites such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, YouTube, Instagram, and Reddit to the burgeoning metaverse encompassing cryptocurrencies and online gaming to government systems such as China’s Social Credit System and India’s Aadhaar.
As we increasingly integrate our society, culture and politics within a hyper-networked fabric, Auerbach explains how the interactions of billions of people with unfathomably large online networks have produced a new sort of ever-changing systems that operate beyond the control of the individuals, companies, and governments that created them.
Meganets, Auerbach explains, have a life of their own, actively resisting attempts to control them as they accumulate data and produce spontaneous, unexpected social groups and uprisings that could not have even existed twenty years ago. And they constantly modify themselves in response to user behavior, resulting in collectively authored algorithms none of us intend or control. These enormous invisible organisms exerting great force on our lives are the new minds of the world, increasingly commandeering our daily lives and inner realities.
Auerbach’s analysis of these gargantuan opaque digital forces yield important insights such Auerbach then comes full circle, showing that while we cannot ultimately control meganets we can tame them through the counterintuitive measures he describes in detail.
352 pages, Hardcover
Published March 14, 2023
41 people are currently reading
1991 people want to read
About the author
David B. Auerbach
6 books160 followersI am a writer, technologist, and software engineer. I am the author of MEGANETS (PublicAffairs, 2023) and BITWISE (Pantheon, 2018). I live in New York with my family and 5000 books.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
March 20, 2023
There are many ironies in cyberspace. One is that it promised to bring people together from all over the world because they had the same interests, passions and positions. Today, we damn the internet for bringing people together from all over the world with the same interests, passions and positions. They’ve turned into intransigent blocks of counterfactual opinion and hate. A whole universe of irony can be found in Meganets, by David Auerbach. He shows clearly, cogently and even patiently that social media and other mass data accumulators form meganets that are well beyond the control of their makers, and most importantly, that influencing them requires ironic counter-intuitive tactics.
The metaverse: everything old is new again
The book begins with a detailed look at the metaverse by Facebook, now called Meta. Meta says its metaverse is the future of the internet, a virtual world where players can purchase goods and services, and live a life virtually. Everything will be known about the players, every transaction, connection, conversation, movement, time spent on every little thing and so on, as they live out entire lives there. This will have appeal to advertisers, they say. So if you’re looking to furnish an office in the metaverse, Meta can bombard you with designers, contractors and furniture suppliers.
But the metaverse has been available for a long time. It has its fans, but it has never soared in popularity. In fact, all Meta is apparently doing is collecting every aspect of virtual life games and enclosing them in its metaverse. It is a life game in a walled garden, where all the revenues accrue to Meta. And you never have to leave to find anything you decide you want. Just like AOL used to be: a walled-off sub-internet within the open internet. Keep them inside the walls and provide for their every need and desire so you can capture every expenditure. Big deal. We’ve seen that movie before. This time you need to use a 3D mask. Made by a company Meta bought for this purpose.
What Auerbach says they’ve got right is that everything is a game. People will spend hours and hours, and crazy money on games. Meta learned this from Farmville, which Auerbach examines in depth. Make life into a new kind of game, and facebookers, a couple of billion people, will flock there. Or will they? “This time it’s different” is not the best argument.
Crypto, the lumpy oil that lubricates the internet
Auerbach then transitions to cryptocurrencies, the currency of the gaming and the metaverse, and another great irony. The whole selling point of crypto is that it is decentralized. No one controls it; it runs by rules in algorithms. There is no direction from central bankers or other suits. It is stable, self-sufficient and laughs at inflation. Everything is secure and traceable and no one can cheat.
Except hackers, who have stolen billions of dollars’ worth of crypto from individual account holders, or issued billions of new coins to themselves. In order to prevent them getting away with it, the coin has to rewrite its rules, and unfortunately, get a majority of coin holders to agree. As with anything, this is death-defyingly difficult. In one case, the bad guys owned the majority of coins, for example. And if the plan succeeds, the coin forks, so there are two valid blockchain streams, before the scam, and after, with the scammers excised out from in between. They are written out of history. This is hardly an elegant way to run a currency and points to the screaming need for - a centralized power. Someone needs to implement police actions and policy changes before the blockchain makes them permanent and irreversible. Decentralization may be its own worst enemy.
Auerbach examines the Aadhaar ID system in India, by which all government services become accessible with an Aadhaar-issued number. This is has simplified life for a billion people, no small accomplishment. But its success has led the private sector to use those same IDs for its services too, making an already gigantic system into a Leviathan with questionable privacy or recourse. Identity theft becomes well worth the risk; it’s all in that one number. The USA went through this problem with social security numbers. Everyone required them for everything. But criminal and privacy issues meant forcing the private sector to drop that practice. Even Medicare went through a laborious and expensive process to switch everyone over to a new alpha-numeric ID to get away from SSNs. This gets us closer to the concept of meganets.
What is a meganet?
Meganets are systems like metverse, facebook and Aadhaar that thrive on data. They never have enough. There’s always something new to learn. They gobble it up and spit it back in forms often totally surprising and innovative. The more data there is, the more the meganet grows new branches. The algorithms themselves run it, invent new uses and applications, and direct what users see in their accounts and feeds. As well as which ads to show them and when, and who they should follow.
The people who created them do not and cannot control them. When Google says it cannot instruct Search to forgo a certain result requested by offended groups, that is more or less the truth. They have to cripple some functionality across the board to prevent the one search result. Like a cryptocurrency forking, it is inelegant to have to force ad hoc change. Meganets are designed to learn, adapt and expand on their own. They report to no one and need no managing. Auerbach says “A meganet is a persistent, evolving and opaque network that controls how we see the world.”
Meganets are now everywhere, because so very many internet services have the critical mass to take advantage of them. Because, Auerbach says, we now produce more data every day than was produced in the history of mankind up to 2000 AD. Every day. Meganets digest it, organize the data, label and tag it, manipulate it and produce insights that are unprecedented, if only because the amount of data is so gigantic that humans are not capable of achieving the same insights. It is just not humanly possible.
The meganet universe moves and evolves so fast, humans can’t even conduct replicable experiments with them as they “are never in the same place twice,” he says.
Meganets dispense with central control. Instead they are powered by volume (of inputs), velocity (of activity), and virality (the spread of inputs by users). These are the key factors common to meganets. They give them their power. The more these factors are present and grow, the more the meganet grows, adapts, and learns. And changes what users are allowed see and do. This is the kernel of what might turn out to be a unified theory of big data and meganets.
Artificial Intelligence: the same but different
If artificial intelligence is added to the mix, the results could be anything. But Auerbach argues that AI is not anything like human intelligence. He spends a great deal of space explaining that AI is not creating a human brain. AI systems crunch data. They can pull needed data out of huge databases and discern patterns from it all. With enough data, they can determine subtle differences. Or tone and attitude. AI can write an essay with the expertise it has taught itself. Or a novel. Or create a graphic or a deepfake video. But it cannot think. He says AI has no idea what it has written actually means. The only thing that matters to an AI app is the math. Meaning has no place. Motive has no place. Purpose has no place. So while AI is a threat, it is not the kind of threat most feared in the media on a daily basis.
Writers spend a lot of time comparing AI to the human brain. People like Auerbach say it is insulting to both. AI has sorting and calculating powers well beyond any brain. And the brain can think, assign meaning and judge data that AI cannot do at all. Taking this analogy to the rest of the human body, Auerbach says writing a program to control the feedback loop on meganets “becomes like trying to write a program to administer the human body. There are too many interlocking pieces, dynamically affecting one another.” And the meganet “sprouts new organs even as its existing ones mutate.”
He says both AI and meganets work on parallelism, through which they can rack up an overall picture from the data processed separately, creating “a whole greater than the sum of its parts.” But it is still not intelligence: “It is far easier for algorithms and AI to police tone than (to) understand content.”
Although there is no center from which to control them, humans are forever trying to control meganets with negative limitations. The only response the coders have come up with is banning: banning keywords, banning accounts, banning groups. It has never worked, Auerbach says. He uses the term Whac-a-mole numerous times to describe the pointless ways people attempt to corral meganets. It has proven a worthless tactic. But it’s all they seem to know to try.
Defending against meganets: offense is the best defense
Auerbach’s outside the box thinking leads him in a counter-intuitive direction. He thinks the only way to control meganets is to dilute them with even more data. In his words: “it is only widescale and untargeted action that has a chance of changing the overall structure and function.” It’s the final irony: using big data, even made up data, to slow the data crunching we sought so hard to devise.
Here are some “laws” Auerbach has learned about meganets:
“It is far easier to put information into the meganet than to remove information from it.
It is far easier for information to spread across meganets than for it to be contained.
It is far easier for information to be wrong than it is to be right.”
So the prejudice is precisely against reining it in. Meganets and AI are meant to be free and free-roaming, by design. So why do managers persist in trying to corral meganets by breaking them? Auerbach sees another way. In his Conclusions, he proposes totally counter-intuitive solutions (that might or might not work as planned, he admits). They are based on the three principles of meganets (above): volume, velocity and virality. This kind of thinking alone makes the whole book worthwhile:
- “Cultivating instability in the meganet, rather than one’s preferred form of stability, will shatter the hardened plaque of toxicity that attaches to its worse places.”
- One form of instability is a slowdown in velocity, making it more cumbersome to circulate a meme by posting it to everyone at once.
- Groups could be limited in size to prevent them gaining critical mass.
- Posts with links could be deprioritized.
- Turn taking means prioritizing posts from those who haven’t been heard from as often. Perhaps a blockchain would demonstrate the fairness of it, rather than have people screaming they’ve been barred.
- Chaos injection means adding an unpredictable layer. Auerbach cites ranked choice voting, by which voters signal their second and third choices for second and third rounds if the first round is not conclusive. The results could be anything. It makes political microtargeting essentially impossible, for example.
- Shaking up the data means making the meganet’s learned assumptions about how various groups operate, invalid.
- Poisoning the well with inaccurate data. Or not filling in data completely or truthfully.
This is not a battle plan to win a war. This is guerilla warfare to slow down the enemy’s advance.
The future is arguable
Looking forward, Auerbach argues that meganets will divide people into ever more specialized groups, such that their leaders may be completely unknown outside their groups, as opposed to today when these leaders have global influencer rankings. I totally disagree with his scenario, based purely on what we see happening when extreme specialization takes hold. A couple of examples: Truth Social, Donald Trump’s answer to twitter, is an empty canyon, echoing very little, precisely because everyone there came to it because they agree. There’s no one to hate there, no one to troll, no one to threaten or dox. There isn’t even anyone to convert. It has no cross fertilization capabilities.
Similarly, there is an extreme-right dating app that attracts thousands of men. Unfortunately, that’s all it attracts. There are basically no women on the app for them to find a kindred spirit. Extreme-right tends to be a patriarchal, white supremacist ethos of no great interest to women. In other words, humans are not two dimensional, and won’t be labeled as easily as Auerbach and meganets seem to say. I for one cannot picture the future broken into tiny cells of same-interest people who have no desire to be seen or heard by a wider audience, or who only have one interest in life. Fame is the name of the game. If not to be, at least to rub shoulders with. Writing responses right on the posts of Barack Obama or Elon Musk is an unhoped for ability that will not be let go so easily.
David Auerbach has the gift of perspective. Even as a young man working at Microsoft and then Google, he could see the fault lines, the way the two companies differed in leveraging the internet, and how the future would unfold under each of their leaderships. He could see where they fit in the scheme of things (and therefore left one for the other then the second one too). His writing is clear, linear and simple. He explains everything in a smooth, confident and effective fashion. His arguments are measured and sound. He has researched far, wide and especially deep. He is believable and credible. It is a rare privilege to read such a fog-clearing book as Meganets, since its subject is so totally fogbound that it has led all the media and experts astray for years. It is hugely important to understanding the future of cyberspace, business, privacy, and mankind itself.
David Wineberg
(Meganets, David Auerbach , March 2023)
If you liked this review, I invite you to read more in my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. And you already know it is well-written. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-...
The metaverse: everything old is new again
The book begins with a detailed look at the metaverse by Facebook, now called Meta. Meta says its metaverse is the future of the internet, a virtual world where players can purchase goods and services, and live a life virtually. Everything will be known about the players, every transaction, connection, conversation, movement, time spent on every little thing and so on, as they live out entire lives there. This will have appeal to advertisers, they say. So if you’re looking to furnish an office in the metaverse, Meta can bombard you with designers, contractors and furniture suppliers.
But the metaverse has been available for a long time. It has its fans, but it has never soared in popularity. In fact, all Meta is apparently doing is collecting every aspect of virtual life games and enclosing them in its metaverse. It is a life game in a walled garden, where all the revenues accrue to Meta. And you never have to leave to find anything you decide you want. Just like AOL used to be: a walled-off sub-internet within the open internet. Keep them inside the walls and provide for their every need and desire so you can capture every expenditure. Big deal. We’ve seen that movie before. This time you need to use a 3D mask. Made by a company Meta bought for this purpose.
What Auerbach says they’ve got right is that everything is a game. People will spend hours and hours, and crazy money on games. Meta learned this from Farmville, which Auerbach examines in depth. Make life into a new kind of game, and facebookers, a couple of billion people, will flock there. Or will they? “This time it’s different” is not the best argument.
Crypto, the lumpy oil that lubricates the internet
Auerbach then transitions to cryptocurrencies, the currency of the gaming and the metaverse, and another great irony. The whole selling point of crypto is that it is decentralized. No one controls it; it runs by rules in algorithms. There is no direction from central bankers or other suits. It is stable, self-sufficient and laughs at inflation. Everything is secure and traceable and no one can cheat.
Except hackers, who have stolen billions of dollars’ worth of crypto from individual account holders, or issued billions of new coins to themselves. In order to prevent them getting away with it, the coin has to rewrite its rules, and unfortunately, get a majority of coin holders to agree. As with anything, this is death-defyingly difficult. In one case, the bad guys owned the majority of coins, for example. And if the plan succeeds, the coin forks, so there are two valid blockchain streams, before the scam, and after, with the scammers excised out from in between. They are written out of history. This is hardly an elegant way to run a currency and points to the screaming need for - a centralized power. Someone needs to implement police actions and policy changes before the blockchain makes them permanent and irreversible. Decentralization may be its own worst enemy.
Auerbach examines the Aadhaar ID system in India, by which all government services become accessible with an Aadhaar-issued number. This is has simplified life for a billion people, no small accomplishment. But its success has led the private sector to use those same IDs for its services too, making an already gigantic system into a Leviathan with questionable privacy or recourse. Identity theft becomes well worth the risk; it’s all in that one number. The USA went through this problem with social security numbers. Everyone required them for everything. But criminal and privacy issues meant forcing the private sector to drop that practice. Even Medicare went through a laborious and expensive process to switch everyone over to a new alpha-numeric ID to get away from SSNs. This gets us closer to the concept of meganets.
What is a meganet?
Meganets are systems like metverse, facebook and Aadhaar that thrive on data. They never have enough. There’s always something new to learn. They gobble it up and spit it back in forms often totally surprising and innovative. The more data there is, the more the meganet grows new branches. The algorithms themselves run it, invent new uses and applications, and direct what users see in their accounts and feeds. As well as which ads to show them and when, and who they should follow.
The people who created them do not and cannot control them. When Google says it cannot instruct Search to forgo a certain result requested by offended groups, that is more or less the truth. They have to cripple some functionality across the board to prevent the one search result. Like a cryptocurrency forking, it is inelegant to have to force ad hoc change. Meganets are designed to learn, adapt and expand on their own. They report to no one and need no managing. Auerbach says “A meganet is a persistent, evolving and opaque network that controls how we see the world.”
Meganets are now everywhere, because so very many internet services have the critical mass to take advantage of them. Because, Auerbach says, we now produce more data every day than was produced in the history of mankind up to 2000 AD. Every day. Meganets digest it, organize the data, label and tag it, manipulate it and produce insights that are unprecedented, if only because the amount of data is so gigantic that humans are not capable of achieving the same insights. It is just not humanly possible.
The meganet universe moves and evolves so fast, humans can’t even conduct replicable experiments with them as they “are never in the same place twice,” he says.
Meganets dispense with central control. Instead they are powered by volume (of inputs), velocity (of activity), and virality (the spread of inputs by users). These are the key factors common to meganets. They give them their power. The more these factors are present and grow, the more the meganet grows, adapts, and learns. And changes what users are allowed see and do. This is the kernel of what might turn out to be a unified theory of big data and meganets.
Artificial Intelligence: the same but different
If artificial intelligence is added to the mix, the results could be anything. But Auerbach argues that AI is not anything like human intelligence. He spends a great deal of space explaining that AI is not creating a human brain. AI systems crunch data. They can pull needed data out of huge databases and discern patterns from it all. With enough data, they can determine subtle differences. Or tone and attitude. AI can write an essay with the expertise it has taught itself. Or a novel. Or create a graphic or a deepfake video. But it cannot think. He says AI has no idea what it has written actually means. The only thing that matters to an AI app is the math. Meaning has no place. Motive has no place. Purpose has no place. So while AI is a threat, it is not the kind of threat most feared in the media on a daily basis.
Writers spend a lot of time comparing AI to the human brain. People like Auerbach say it is insulting to both. AI has sorting and calculating powers well beyond any brain. And the brain can think, assign meaning and judge data that AI cannot do at all. Taking this analogy to the rest of the human body, Auerbach says writing a program to control the feedback loop on meganets “becomes like trying to write a program to administer the human body. There are too many interlocking pieces, dynamically affecting one another.” And the meganet “sprouts new organs even as its existing ones mutate.”
He says both AI and meganets work on parallelism, through which they can rack up an overall picture from the data processed separately, creating “a whole greater than the sum of its parts.” But it is still not intelligence: “It is far easier for algorithms and AI to police tone than (to) understand content.”
Although there is no center from which to control them, humans are forever trying to control meganets with negative limitations. The only response the coders have come up with is banning: banning keywords, banning accounts, banning groups. It has never worked, Auerbach says. He uses the term Whac-a-mole numerous times to describe the pointless ways people attempt to corral meganets. It has proven a worthless tactic. But it’s all they seem to know to try.
Defending against meganets: offense is the best defense
Auerbach’s outside the box thinking leads him in a counter-intuitive direction. He thinks the only way to control meganets is to dilute them with even more data. In his words: “it is only widescale and untargeted action that has a chance of changing the overall structure and function.” It’s the final irony: using big data, even made up data, to slow the data crunching we sought so hard to devise.
Here are some “laws” Auerbach has learned about meganets:
“It is far easier to put information into the meganet than to remove information from it.
It is far easier for information to spread across meganets than for it to be contained.
It is far easier for information to be wrong than it is to be right.”
So the prejudice is precisely against reining it in. Meganets and AI are meant to be free and free-roaming, by design. So why do managers persist in trying to corral meganets by breaking them? Auerbach sees another way. In his Conclusions, he proposes totally counter-intuitive solutions (that might or might not work as planned, he admits). They are based on the three principles of meganets (above): volume, velocity and virality. This kind of thinking alone makes the whole book worthwhile:
- “Cultivating instability in the meganet, rather than one’s preferred form of stability, will shatter the hardened plaque of toxicity that attaches to its worse places.”
- One form of instability is a slowdown in velocity, making it more cumbersome to circulate a meme by posting it to everyone at once.
- Groups could be limited in size to prevent them gaining critical mass.
- Posts with links could be deprioritized.
- Turn taking means prioritizing posts from those who haven’t been heard from as often. Perhaps a blockchain would demonstrate the fairness of it, rather than have people screaming they’ve been barred.
- Chaos injection means adding an unpredictable layer. Auerbach cites ranked choice voting, by which voters signal their second and third choices for second and third rounds if the first round is not conclusive. The results could be anything. It makes political microtargeting essentially impossible, for example.
- Shaking up the data means making the meganet’s learned assumptions about how various groups operate, invalid.
- Poisoning the well with inaccurate data. Or not filling in data completely or truthfully.
This is not a battle plan to win a war. This is guerilla warfare to slow down the enemy’s advance.
The future is arguable
Looking forward, Auerbach argues that meganets will divide people into ever more specialized groups, such that their leaders may be completely unknown outside their groups, as opposed to today when these leaders have global influencer rankings. I totally disagree with his scenario, based purely on what we see happening when extreme specialization takes hold. A couple of examples: Truth Social, Donald Trump’s answer to twitter, is an empty canyon, echoing very little, precisely because everyone there came to it because they agree. There’s no one to hate there, no one to troll, no one to threaten or dox. There isn’t even anyone to convert. It has no cross fertilization capabilities.
Similarly, there is an extreme-right dating app that attracts thousands of men. Unfortunately, that’s all it attracts. There are basically no women on the app for them to find a kindred spirit. Extreme-right tends to be a patriarchal, white supremacist ethos of no great interest to women. In other words, humans are not two dimensional, and won’t be labeled as easily as Auerbach and meganets seem to say. I for one cannot picture the future broken into tiny cells of same-interest people who have no desire to be seen or heard by a wider audience, or who only have one interest in life. Fame is the name of the game. If not to be, at least to rub shoulders with. Writing responses right on the posts of Barack Obama or Elon Musk is an unhoped for ability that will not be let go so easily.
David Auerbach has the gift of perspective. Even as a young man working at Microsoft and then Google, he could see the fault lines, the way the two companies differed in leveraging the internet, and how the future would unfold under each of their leaderships. He could see where they fit in the scheme of things (and therefore left one for the other then the second one too). His writing is clear, linear and simple. He explains everything in a smooth, confident and effective fashion. His arguments are measured and sound. He has researched far, wide and especially deep. He is believable and credible. It is a rare privilege to read such a fog-clearing book as Meganets, since its subject is so totally fogbound that it has led all the media and experts astray for years. It is hugely important to understanding the future of cyberspace, business, privacy, and mankind itself.
David Wineberg
(Meganets, David Auerbach , March 2023)
If you liked this review, I invite you to read more in my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. And you already know it is well-written. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-...
November 10, 2025
I feel bad. I finished listening to this less than a month ago and I remember next to nothing about it other than we are all doomed. This is going to need to be a re-listen if I have any hope of absorbing any of the information in it.
I blame me, as I am NOT a technical person by any stretch of the imagination, so most of it went right over my head.
I don't recall any major complaints about the narrator. Since I tend to react to volume inconsistency and I don't remember that being an issue, I assume it was not a problem for me.
3, I need to bone up on my computer technical understanding if I want to get anything out of this book, stars.
My thanks to libro.fm and Hachette Audio for an ALC of this book to listen to and review.
I blame me, as I am NOT a technical person by any stretch of the imagination, so most of it went right over my head.
I don't recall any major complaints about the narrator. Since I tend to react to volume inconsistency and I don't remember that being an issue, I assume it was not a problem for me.
3, I need to bone up on my computer technical understanding if I want to get anything out of this book, stars.
My thanks to libro.fm and Hachette Audio for an ALC of this book to listen to and review.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 10, 2023
Remarkably well-researched and thoughtfully presented, Meganets is a lucid and well-written examination of a topic so confusingly abstract (at least to the likes of me) that I hesitate to summarize* it. (I also find it frightening, much like the Internet writ large.) But even though the material is difficult for me, Auerbach writes so well that he gives me the illusion that I can understand it, sort of like I can flatter myself into believing I'm fluent in Swedish after binge-watching a bunch of Ingmar Bergman DVDs.
Auerbach is especially good at making fine distinctions; for instance, I found his discussion of our online identities as a "digital mirage" extremely helpful. I'm also consoled by the news that the meganets, however vast and incomprehensible, also kind of suck at the form of thinking that we think of as, you know, actual thinking. The problem with so many tech books is that you don't get the sense that the authors have anything resembling a theory of mind, or that they're interested in pursuing any of the epistemelogical, ontological, and ethical questions that interest philosophers. Auerbach is very good at translating the language of bits and bytes and integers (or whatever those ones and zeros are; I'm really not kidding when I say I know nothing about computers and indeed did not even touch one until I was a senior in college) into the language preferred by literary flibbertigibbets like myself. I especially enjoyed the brilliant epigraphs for each chapter, which all seemed to illuminate his argument in unexpected and effective ways.
*Auerbach provides a little mnemonic that I hope will help me remember what constitutes a meganet, as distinct from the independent networks that might serve as constituent parts: velocity, volume, and virality.
Auerbach is especially good at making fine distinctions; for instance, I found his discussion of our online identities as a "digital mirage" extremely helpful. I'm also consoled by the news that the meganets, however vast and incomprehensible, also kind of suck at the form of thinking that we think of as, you know, actual thinking. The problem with so many tech books is that you don't get the sense that the authors have anything resembling a theory of mind, or that they're interested in pursuing any of the epistemelogical, ontological, and ethical questions that interest philosophers. Auerbach is very good at translating the language of bits and bytes and integers (or whatever those ones and zeros are; I'm really not kidding when I say I know nothing about computers and indeed did not even touch one until I was a senior in college) into the language preferred by literary flibbertigibbets like myself. I especially enjoyed the brilliant epigraphs for each chapter, which all seemed to illuminate his argument in unexpected and effective ways.
*Auerbach provides a little mnemonic that I hope will help me remember what constitutes a meganet, as distinct from the independent networks that might serve as constituent parts: velocity, volume, and virality.
October 29, 2022
A Needed Conversation. As someone also in tech at a megacorporation (though to be clear, not the same ones Auerbach has worked for) that openly seeks to employ several of the technologies discussed in this book, and as someone who finished this book right as Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter was being completed and Facebook announced that it was open to colluding with Twitter regarding content moderation... this was an absolutely fascinating look at my field and where at least one part of it currently is. But it is also written in a very approachable manner, one such that anyone who so much as uses any social media even casually or who interacts with their government virtually at all (if you see what I did there ;) ) will be able to follow along with reasonably well. Fear not! No Discrete Modeling, Statistics, Calculus, or any other high level collegiate mathematics Computer Science majors are forced to endure will be required here. :)
And yet, this is also a book that everyone *needs* to read and understand. Auerbach manages to boil his primary thesis of what meganets are and how they operate into three very simple yet utterly complex words: Volume. Velocity. Virality. And he repeats these words so *very* often that you *will* remember them long after you've read this text. (Though I note this writing this review just 24 hrs after finishing my read of it, and knowing I'll read at least 30 more books before 2022 is done. So check back with me on that after this book actually publishes in about 4.5 months. :D)
Indeed, really the only problem here - potentially corrected before publication - is that at least in the copy I read, the bibliography only accounted for about 15% of the text, which is fairly light for a nonfiction book in my experience, where 20-30% is more normal and 50% is particularly well documented. Thus, the single star deduction.
Still, this truly is a book everyone, from casual readers uninterested in anything computer yet who are forced to use computers in modern life to the uber-techs actually working in and leading the fields in question to the politicians and activists seeking to understand and control these technologies, needs to read. Very much recommended.
And yet, this is also a book that everyone *needs* to read and understand. Auerbach manages to boil his primary thesis of what meganets are and how they operate into three very simple yet utterly complex words: Volume. Velocity. Virality. And he repeats these words so *very* often that you *will* remember them long after you've read this text. (Though I note this writing this review just 24 hrs after finishing my read of it, and knowing I'll read at least 30 more books before 2022 is done. So check back with me on that after this book actually publishes in about 4.5 months. :D)
Indeed, really the only problem here - potentially corrected before publication - is that at least in the copy I read, the bibliography only accounted for about 15% of the text, which is fairly light for a nonfiction book in my experience, where 20-30% is more normal and 50% is particularly well documented. Thus, the single star deduction.
Still, this truly is a book everyone, from casual readers uninterested in anything computer yet who are forced to use computers in modern life to the uber-techs actually working in and leading the fields in question to the politicians and activists seeking to understand and control these technologies, needs to read. Very much recommended.
October 10, 2023
Auerbach does his darndest to sell his term "meganet" and sure, I'll buy it. It can be a useful way of concisely describing the feedback loops driven by human-computer interaction. What doesn't fly is his attempt to get "digital mirage" to catch on. Buddy, "digital mirror," "online footprint," etc., are already sufficient, like c'mon man, focus on coining your pragmatic term.
Anyway, Auerbach provides wonderful analysis into dead, current, and emerging meganets. His examples, commentary, and narrative style really work for the most part, but he always seems to shoot himself in the foot at each section's conclusion. It always boils down to 'I did x, y, and z to show how this meganet is a feedback loop built upon continuous interaction between humans and the web.'
Consistency and summary, especially in dense non-fiction pieces, can be really helpful for driving home a point, but the triteness of the summaries here undermine the key difference and complexities within the examples he provides.
Anyway, Auerbach provides wonderful analysis into dead, current, and emerging meganets. His examples, commentary, and narrative style really work for the most part, but he always seems to shoot himself in the foot at each section's conclusion. It always boils down to 'I did x, y, and z to show how this meganet is a feedback loop built upon continuous interaction between humans and the web.'
Consistency and summary, especially in dense non-fiction pieces, can be really helpful for driving home a point, but the triteness of the summaries here undermine the key difference and complexities within the examples he provides.
March 30, 2023
I remember David Auerbach saying in an interview after the release of his first book, Bitwise, that that book was to be the first in a trilogy covering the past, present, and future of technology. As the book on tech’s past, I thought Bitwise very interesting—covering a lot of ground, while making illuminating and unexpected connections such as comparing personality tests to DnD character types or the raising of children to programming a computer.
Meganets, the book on tech’s present, is more focused, if not quite as eclectic and free-ranging as Bitwise, while still being insightful and imaginative. The term meganet is a coinage of the author. Meganets are the modern internet, with their unfathomable abundance of data. Auerbach argues that this influx of data (derived from social media, YouTube, and other services) has made the modern internet an entirely different beast than what came before. Meganets operate much like the weather-unpredictable and uncontrollable.
I found it useful to consider new technologies such as AI, cryptocurrency, and government IDs like China’s social credit system as not being independent phenomenon, but rather technologies that were only possible because of the meganet and whose operations cannot be understood without a grasp of how the meganet functions.
Meganets, the book on tech’s present, is more focused, if not quite as eclectic and free-ranging as Bitwise, while still being insightful and imaginative. The term meganet is a coinage of the author. Meganets are the modern internet, with their unfathomable abundance of data. Auerbach argues that this influx of data (derived from social media, YouTube, and other services) has made the modern internet an entirely different beast than what came before. Meganets operate much like the weather-unpredictable and uncontrollable.
I found it useful to consider new technologies such as AI, cryptocurrency, and government IDs like China’s social credit system as not being independent phenomenon, but rather technologies that were only possible because of the meganet and whose operations cannot be understood without a grasp of how the meganet functions.
September 14, 2023
I picked this book up after my mentor Mrs. Reed reviewed it on the Law and Liberty network. I picked it up anticipating a critique of big-tech in line with my personal choice to stay off popular social media. The description seemed to target a particular "meganet" which I assumed to be synonymous with "big tech" and "AI".
After I began reading, I understood that this book was much more than just a run-of-the-mill critique. It offered much more. The author, David, a graduate from Yale, built a career blending computers and literature and witnessed the growth of the first meganets in the pre-and post- Facebook world. He was the ideal person from whom I wished to hear the contents of the book and I was not disappointed.
A brief summary of the book is as follows.
Meganets are tightly integrated sets of servers and clients running on software based algorithms which sees a continual feedback loop between the participants of the network and the code itself. David argues that a successful meganet thrives on the three essentials - volume, velocity and virality.
Examples of meganets include Google's Adwords that used PageRank to rank websites, Facebook's social network that integrated one aspect of people's social lives with targeted advertisements, Twitter and Linkedin that took the network model to public and business life, India's Aadhar and China's Social Credit Scheme, Gaming, Metaverse and Cryptocurrency and Blockchain-based emerging technology.
David's main argument is that these meganets had their benefits but have also increasingly led to a loss of control and erosion of human agency. This he, argues, is inherent in a meganet's design and despite the best intentions of creators and regulators, cannot be stemmed or controlled without real-world consequences. The theme is that the human mind cannot keep up with the petabytes of data such meganets generate and as a consequence cannot foresee the results of any action that they take to attempt to control the meganet - be it regulating or adding more code.
He discusses various purported solutions such as hard and soft resets, AI and Deeplearning to compensate for limited human comprehension and then dismisses them as either hurting the benefits that the meganets bring or adding to the complexities they breed. He instead suggests untested (on a large scale) and counterintuitive solutions that do not reduce the benefits of such meganets but greatly brings them to human and manageable levels.
Although at many points in the book, he made me feel like we are doomed and the situation can never be controlled, I found his outlook largely hopeful and also moving forward. There was no hard call for banning/closing/ending the meganets and the tech revolutions they bring. He instead suggests a more palliative equilibrium where we keep the advances but slow it down to a manageable level. I liked that outlook as much as it challenged my own reactions to such situations.
The author personally bats for solutions that uphold individuality, agency and dignity online but concedes that such security ought necessarily come at the cost of privacy and some civil liberties. In fact, establishing strong and verifiabkle online identities was one of the solutions he sought in addition to deliberately introducing error and new ideas/people into established groups/networks. The meganets' tendency to classify similarity, homegenise groups and create self-affirming echo chambers can only be offset by deliberately introducing erroneous data and mixing up the groups, he argues. This can go counter to the individual choice to associate with who we like and are interested in. As much as meganets amplify our abiity to do this to the point of excluding other views, I still do not think that people should be forced to (even softly) to engage with strange and novel ideas/people without them wanting to. But I agree that given the meganet's tendencies and limitations, this seems to be the best bet. On principle, I think the philosophy of consent and agency ought to have a relook.
I also liked how he thinks that our unwavering faith in the certainty of computing and meganets is the reason why we cannot fathom errors to be possible (even though they happen a lot more frequently than we think). David's argument rests on the fact that even a basic meganet with a simple task of reading digits on mail only had a 99.6% success rate. He argues that complex meganets built on multiple layers of such cognitive AI, algorithms are bound to make mistakes. AI and meganets are superhuman in some respects but tediously dumb and sub-human in others which is why he prompts us to see meganet for what they are instead of valorizing it to be the epitome of Science and God.
Some of his solutions also border on the idea of general social acceptance of meganets being error-prone. It can stop us from giving it the highly idealized place that it has now as an efficient and error-less technology. In that respect, we will be able to win back our personal spaces and see online identities/presence as what it is - a digital mirage (rather than the popular digital twin concept). This line of thought is very empowering and seems to me the right way forward.
This was my first tech-based non-fiction in many years. It was harder than normal for me to blaze through and form connections with my other books but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Especially striking were moments of epiphany and nostalgia of my teenage days when I experimented with gaming the algorithms of social media sites and Google. It is fascinating to know that all the techies were also experimenting at the same time on users like me. I am happy this book took me on a journey to understand how we as humans got here in 2023 from the very basic internet tasks in 1985. It leaves me wiser and optimistic.
After I began reading, I understood that this book was much more than just a run-of-the-mill critique. It offered much more. The author, David, a graduate from Yale, built a career blending computers and literature and witnessed the growth of the first meganets in the pre-and post- Facebook world. He was the ideal person from whom I wished to hear the contents of the book and I was not disappointed.
A brief summary of the book is as follows.
Meganets are tightly integrated sets of servers and clients running on software based algorithms which sees a continual feedback loop between the participants of the network and the code itself. David argues that a successful meganet thrives on the three essentials - volume, velocity and virality.
Examples of meganets include Google's Adwords that used PageRank to rank websites, Facebook's social network that integrated one aspect of people's social lives with targeted advertisements, Twitter and Linkedin that took the network model to public and business life, India's Aadhar and China's Social Credit Scheme, Gaming, Metaverse and Cryptocurrency and Blockchain-based emerging technology.
David's main argument is that these meganets had their benefits but have also increasingly led to a loss of control and erosion of human agency. This he, argues, is inherent in a meganet's design and despite the best intentions of creators and regulators, cannot be stemmed or controlled without real-world consequences. The theme is that the human mind cannot keep up with the petabytes of data such meganets generate and as a consequence cannot foresee the results of any action that they take to attempt to control the meganet - be it regulating or adding more code.
He discusses various purported solutions such as hard and soft resets, AI and Deeplearning to compensate for limited human comprehension and then dismisses them as either hurting the benefits that the meganets bring or adding to the complexities they breed. He instead suggests untested (on a large scale) and counterintuitive solutions that do not reduce the benefits of such meganets but greatly brings them to human and manageable levels.
Although at many points in the book, he made me feel like we are doomed and the situation can never be controlled, I found his outlook largely hopeful and also moving forward. There was no hard call for banning/closing/ending the meganets and the tech revolutions they bring. He instead suggests a more palliative equilibrium where we keep the advances but slow it down to a manageable level. I liked that outlook as much as it challenged my own reactions to such situations.
The author personally bats for solutions that uphold individuality, agency and dignity online but concedes that such security ought necessarily come at the cost of privacy and some civil liberties. In fact, establishing strong and verifiabkle online identities was one of the solutions he sought in addition to deliberately introducing error and new ideas/people into established groups/networks. The meganets' tendency to classify similarity, homegenise groups and create self-affirming echo chambers can only be offset by deliberately introducing erroneous data and mixing up the groups, he argues. This can go counter to the individual choice to associate with who we like and are interested in. As much as meganets amplify our abiity to do this to the point of excluding other views, I still do not think that people should be forced to (even softly) to engage with strange and novel ideas/people without them wanting to. But I agree that given the meganet's tendencies and limitations, this seems to be the best bet. On principle, I think the philosophy of consent and agency ought to have a relook.
I also liked how he thinks that our unwavering faith in the certainty of computing and meganets is the reason why we cannot fathom errors to be possible (even though they happen a lot more frequently than we think). David's argument rests on the fact that even a basic meganet with a simple task of reading digits on mail only had a 99.6% success rate. He argues that complex meganets built on multiple layers of such cognitive AI, algorithms are bound to make mistakes. AI and meganets are superhuman in some respects but tediously dumb and sub-human in others which is why he prompts us to see meganet for what they are instead of valorizing it to be the epitome of Science and God.
Some of his solutions also border on the idea of general social acceptance of meganets being error-prone. It can stop us from giving it the highly idealized place that it has now as an efficient and error-less technology. In that respect, we will be able to win back our personal spaces and see online identities/presence as what it is - a digital mirage (rather than the popular digital twin concept). This line of thought is very empowering and seems to me the right way forward.
This was my first tech-based non-fiction in many years. It was harder than normal for me to blaze through and form connections with my other books but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Especially striking were moments of epiphany and nostalgia of my teenage days when I experimented with gaming the algorithms of social media sites and Google. It is fascinating to know that all the techies were also experimenting at the same time on users like me. I am happy this book took me on a journey to understand how we as humans got here in 2023 from the very basic internet tasks in 1985. It leaves me wiser and optimistic.
April 3, 2023
Volume + virality + velocity = probably the most important book I've read in 5 years
Every once in a while, you run into a book that shatters your worldview into smithereens, then rebuilds it with better bricks. Which is my way of saying Meganets is some seriously mind-blowing stuff, and the most important book I've read in the past 5 years. Why? Because it's about the large-scale technological underpinning of the planet: meganets.
Okay, so what the heck is a meganet, you ask? Fair question, since Auerbach is the one who coined the term. It's worth noting that Auerbach is a consummate insider: 10 years at Microsoft, and then a long stint at Google till 2011. He had firsthand experience as an observer and builder of emerging meganets, which are basically gigantic multimillion-node networks run by self-adjusting algorithms that the owners can't control. They are characterized by velocity, virality and volume. And we're only starting to appreciate their chaotically destructive powers.
With clinical precision, Auerbach lays out how these meganets are out of the control of their own creators. Facebook, Google, YouTube, Reddit you probably know about. But how about World of Warcraft, a multiplayer game with tens of millions of players? The "poisoned blood" pandemic, which was basically "killing" all the players, caused the owners to shut the game down and reset it. Fraud and "forking" in blockchain-based cryptocurrencies can lead to instant chaotic devaluation. Then there's the Aadhaar digital ID system of India, which is already causing huge problems. And the Chinese Social Credit System, which is completely bonkers but surprisingly less intrusive than the Aadhaar created by world's largest democracy. And the story of the "Smooth Love Potion" cryptocurrency crash alone is worth the purchase price of the whole book.
So where's the problem? The problem is that we're royally hosed, that's what: "Throughout this book, I’ve repeatedly stressed two aspects of meganets. First, they are semiautonomous systems, working beyond the direct and even indirect control of humans, self-organizing into persistent, evolving, and opaque forms that have consequences well beyond anything intended by their creators. Second, meganets are highly feedback driven, as their users and algorithms combine to create the volume, velocity, and virality that prevent us from ever keeping up with their current state. These two factors make “control” of a meganet an oxymoron. If we are forever going to be closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, the next meganet blowup, whether it is in social media or cryptocurrency, will inevitably take us by surprise. Rather, we need proactive, systemic, and nonspecific measures that will not wholly prevent the meganet-driven crises we’ve experienced in the last decades (social polarization, disinformation, and economic destabilization among them) but will temper them, mitigating their impact and suppressing the aggressive feedback loops."
Lest you think the book is all doom and gloom, Auerbach also looks into some potential remedies. Limiting sharing and group sizes makes a huge difference, especially on platforms like Facebook. Strategic seeding of networks with disinformation, and heterogeneous actors also help.
This is a tour de force of a book. Not only did it help me finally understand certain concepts for the first time — e.g. cryptocurrency and its inherent weaknesses, "stonks" like GameStop — but I felt like it gave me a telescope into the future. Auerbach's writing is crisp, authoritative and fast-paced. And, most important, now I can back up my fulminating rants against meganets with real data! 10/10 for importance of topic and sheer explanatory power.
-- Ali Binazir, M.D., M.Phil., Happiness Engineer and author of The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman's Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible, the most-highlighted book on Amazon, and Should I Go to Medical School?: An Irreverent Guide to the Pros and Cons of a Career in Medicine
Every once in a while, you run into a book that shatters your worldview into smithereens, then rebuilds it with better bricks. Which is my way of saying Meganets is some seriously mind-blowing stuff, and the most important book I've read in the past 5 years. Why? Because it's about the large-scale technological underpinning of the planet: meganets.
Okay, so what the heck is a meganet, you ask? Fair question, since Auerbach is the one who coined the term. It's worth noting that Auerbach is a consummate insider: 10 years at Microsoft, and then a long stint at Google till 2011. He had firsthand experience as an observer and builder of emerging meganets, which are basically gigantic multimillion-node networks run by self-adjusting algorithms that the owners can't control. They are characterized by velocity, virality and volume. And we're only starting to appreciate their chaotically destructive powers.
With clinical precision, Auerbach lays out how these meganets are out of the control of their own creators. Facebook, Google, YouTube, Reddit you probably know about. But how about World of Warcraft, a multiplayer game with tens of millions of players? The "poisoned blood" pandemic, which was basically "killing" all the players, caused the owners to shut the game down and reset it. Fraud and "forking" in blockchain-based cryptocurrencies can lead to instant chaotic devaluation. Then there's the Aadhaar digital ID system of India, which is already causing huge problems. And the Chinese Social Credit System, which is completely bonkers but surprisingly less intrusive than the Aadhaar created by world's largest democracy. And the story of the "Smooth Love Potion" cryptocurrency crash alone is worth the purchase price of the whole book.
So where's the problem? The problem is that we're royally hosed, that's what: "Throughout this book, I’ve repeatedly stressed two aspects of meganets. First, they are semiautonomous systems, working beyond the direct and even indirect control of humans, self-organizing into persistent, evolving, and opaque forms that have consequences well beyond anything intended by their creators. Second, meganets are highly feedback driven, as their users and algorithms combine to create the volume, velocity, and virality that prevent us from ever keeping up with their current state. These two factors make “control” of a meganet an oxymoron. If we are forever going to be closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, the next meganet blowup, whether it is in social media or cryptocurrency, will inevitably take us by surprise. Rather, we need proactive, systemic, and nonspecific measures that will not wholly prevent the meganet-driven crises we’ve experienced in the last decades (social polarization, disinformation, and economic destabilization among them) but will temper them, mitigating their impact and suppressing the aggressive feedback loops."
Lest you think the book is all doom and gloom, Auerbach also looks into some potential remedies. Limiting sharing and group sizes makes a huge difference, especially on platforms like Facebook. Strategic seeding of networks with disinformation, and heterogeneous actors also help.
This is a tour de force of a book. Not only did it help me finally understand certain concepts for the first time — e.g. cryptocurrency and its inherent weaknesses, "stonks" like GameStop — but I felt like it gave me a telescope into the future. Auerbach's writing is crisp, authoritative and fast-paced. And, most important, now I can back up my fulminating rants against meganets with real data! 10/10 for importance of topic and sheer explanatory power.
-- Ali Binazir, M.D., M.Phil., Happiness Engineer and author of The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman's Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible, the most-highlighted book on Amazon, and Should I Go to Medical School?: An Irreverent Guide to the Pros and Cons of a Career in Medicine
August 19, 2023
Well damn. This is quite the book.
David’s examination of the phenomenon which he terms ‘meganets’ is simultaneously fascinating and horrifying. This book will give you a much clearer understanding of the fundamentally uncontrollable nature of many of the technological forces in our life and how they have and continue to radically shape human engagement with the world. David’s unique experience in this world, combined with his ability to shape the story into a compelling narrative, make this a unique book that I think anyone interested in technology’s impact on our lives would benefit from reading.
The one point of contention I had with the book is in the final chapter where he shares his thoughts on the way forward. Although the rest of the book was literally blowing my mind with insights into the problem, I felt like his solutions missed the main point - that meganets are born from the melding of human and machine interaction, but that the issues which arise from meganets are completely dependent upon what the humans choose to do. The technology simply amplifies those choices with volume, velocity and virality, leading to the negative outcomes we experience every day.
David’s solutions though, all focus on the tech side of problem, looking at how to slow down the three V’s, but in my opinion that is simply treating the symptom and not the root cause. The root cause is a degradation in human character which has been drastically accelerated in modern times - but even deeper than that, it is a problem with sinful human nature. While the technical solutions may hold back the tide a little, they will never make a fundamental difference because humans will always find new ways to indulge our sinful nature. But as powerful as the meganets are, they simply cease to function without the input of human beings. So from my point of view, the single best thing we can do to help change the (currently dire) outlook of our collective future, is to develop godly character in ourselves, our families, and those around us.
Favorite Quote: “Artificial intelligence, deep learning in particular, has gained great appeal as a possible way of regaining control over the meganet. Because of the sheer opacity of AI and its algorithmic unreliability, however, its effect will instead be to amplify the uncertainty and loss of control we are already experiencing. There's always the possibility that At may finally achieve its long dreamt-of goal of truly understanding the human, bringing human-level cognition to superhuman size, but the odds are slim. If anything, AI will gain purchase not through advances on its own but through meganets conditioning humans to behave in less complicated and more orderly ways, which Al will be better able to capture. Ironically, for all the worries about a Skynet-like AI taking over the world, the genuine threat to human self-determination is a meganet-driven system that relies not on super powerful AI but on the inscrutable collective impulses of groups of humans organized through fairly rote computation. Technology does not threaten to build an evil mastermind but an incomprehensible ecology of computationalized winds blowing us in unpredictable directions.”
David’s examination of the phenomenon which he terms ‘meganets’ is simultaneously fascinating and horrifying. This book will give you a much clearer understanding of the fundamentally uncontrollable nature of many of the technological forces in our life and how they have and continue to radically shape human engagement with the world. David’s unique experience in this world, combined with his ability to shape the story into a compelling narrative, make this a unique book that I think anyone interested in technology’s impact on our lives would benefit from reading.
The one point of contention I had with the book is in the final chapter where he shares his thoughts on the way forward. Although the rest of the book was literally blowing my mind with insights into the problem, I felt like his solutions missed the main point - that meganets are born from the melding of human and machine interaction, but that the issues which arise from meganets are completely dependent upon what the humans choose to do. The technology simply amplifies those choices with volume, velocity and virality, leading to the negative outcomes we experience every day.
David’s solutions though, all focus on the tech side of problem, looking at how to slow down the three V’s, but in my opinion that is simply treating the symptom and not the root cause. The root cause is a degradation in human character which has been drastically accelerated in modern times - but even deeper than that, it is a problem with sinful human nature. While the technical solutions may hold back the tide a little, they will never make a fundamental difference because humans will always find new ways to indulge our sinful nature. But as powerful as the meganets are, they simply cease to function without the input of human beings. So from my point of view, the single best thing we can do to help change the (currently dire) outlook of our collective future, is to develop godly character in ourselves, our families, and those around us.
Favorite Quote: “Artificial intelligence, deep learning in particular, has gained great appeal as a possible way of regaining control over the meganet. Because of the sheer opacity of AI and its algorithmic unreliability, however, its effect will instead be to amplify the uncertainty and loss of control we are already experiencing. There's always the possibility that At may finally achieve its long dreamt-of goal of truly understanding the human, bringing human-level cognition to superhuman size, but the odds are slim. If anything, AI will gain purchase not through advances on its own but through meganets conditioning humans to behave in less complicated and more orderly ways, which Al will be better able to capture. Ironically, for all the worries about a Skynet-like AI taking over the world, the genuine threat to human self-determination is a meganet-driven system that relies not on super powerful AI but on the inscrutable collective impulses of groups of humans organized through fairly rote computation. Technology does not threaten to build an evil mastermind but an incomprehensible ecology of computationalized winds blowing us in unpredictable directions.”
April 20, 2023
(...)
More crucial is the fact that Auerbach doesn’t really deliver on the promise of his subtitle: he hardly provides an explicit exploration of how the current form of the internet shapes our inner realities, and also much of its influence on our daily lives is only implicitly described. So do not expect a psychological or sociological study, let alone a scientific one.
A sentence like “With every passing day we intuitively sense a loss of control over our daily lives, society, culture, and politics, even as it becomes more difficult to extricate ourselves from our hypernetworked fabric.” is never quantified or backed up with research or data. I can easily give an anecdotal, equally intuitive counterexample: I for one do not feel a loss of control over my daily live, not at all, and I’ve been an active meganet user as long as these meganets have existed.
Likewise, consider this passage:
“Modern society has so long been accustomed to national or international figures (politicians, celebrities) who speak to silent millions that we still have yet to come to grips with the very unsettling fact that it is now amorphous groups who lead and the celebrities and influencers who follow. The most successful cybercelebrities are, in fact, those who either happen to represent an existing trend or those skilled at going with the flow on which they are carried.”
It is presented without backing from any scientific source. I’m not saying there has been no shift, but I’m not so sure about it, and even if such shift did occur: how big is it? Could you really frame it like Auerbach does here? I can easily imagine that Martin Luther, Lenin, Martin Luther King or Tatcher also tapped into already existing sentiments among the amorphous population. Moreover, consumers, voters and religious believers have always been amorphous groups with significant influence on society – for consumers & religious tribes that even has been the case before the onset of modern society and democracy.
Instead of a scientific study, much of Auerbach’s text is a history and analysis of the aspects of the current internet that are relevant to ‘meganets’, most importantly the spectacular rise of recorded data, the exceptional exponential scaling of computer technology, Facebook & the metaverse, Google’s search engine and its business model of monetizing it, cryptocurrencies, MMORPGs like World of Warcarft, the effects of somebody like Elon Musk on Twitter, a chapter on China’s Social Credit System and India’s Aadhaar, and one about why AI won’t help taming these meganets, but will make them even more uncontrollable.
I have to say his basic analysis – on the reasons why these meganets have become impossible to control – is well argued, in a detailed, clear and utterly convincing manner, and so I do feel I have a much better grasp on why the things described in the blurb are indeed the case.
(...)
Full review on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It
More crucial is the fact that Auerbach doesn’t really deliver on the promise of his subtitle: he hardly provides an explicit exploration of how the current form of the internet shapes our inner realities, and also much of its influence on our daily lives is only implicitly described. So do not expect a psychological or sociological study, let alone a scientific one.
A sentence like “With every passing day we intuitively sense a loss of control over our daily lives, society, culture, and politics, even as it becomes more difficult to extricate ourselves from our hypernetworked fabric.” is never quantified or backed up with research or data. I can easily give an anecdotal, equally intuitive counterexample: I for one do not feel a loss of control over my daily live, not at all, and I’ve been an active meganet user as long as these meganets have existed.
Likewise, consider this passage:
“Modern society has so long been accustomed to national or international figures (politicians, celebrities) who speak to silent millions that we still have yet to come to grips with the very unsettling fact that it is now amorphous groups who lead and the celebrities and influencers who follow. The most successful cybercelebrities are, in fact, those who either happen to represent an existing trend or those skilled at going with the flow on which they are carried.”
It is presented without backing from any scientific source. I’m not saying there has been no shift, but I’m not so sure about it, and even if such shift did occur: how big is it? Could you really frame it like Auerbach does here? I can easily imagine that Martin Luther, Lenin, Martin Luther King or Tatcher also tapped into already existing sentiments among the amorphous population. Moreover, consumers, voters and religious believers have always been amorphous groups with significant influence on society – for consumers & religious tribes that even has been the case before the onset of modern society and democracy.
Instead of a scientific study, much of Auerbach’s text is a history and analysis of the aspects of the current internet that are relevant to ‘meganets’, most importantly the spectacular rise of recorded data, the exceptional exponential scaling of computer technology, Facebook & the metaverse, Google’s search engine and its business model of monetizing it, cryptocurrencies, MMORPGs like World of Warcarft, the effects of somebody like Elon Musk on Twitter, a chapter on China’s Social Credit System and India’s Aadhaar, and one about why AI won’t help taming these meganets, but will make them even more uncontrollable.
I have to say his basic analysis – on the reasons why these meganets have become impossible to control – is well argued, in a detailed, clear and utterly convincing manner, and so I do feel I have a much better grasp on why the things described in the blurb are indeed the case.
(...)
Full review on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It
April 26, 2023
Large digital networks are coming to control the world and doing so for reasons that escape their creators, especially in terms of how to control them. It’s complicated. I had just started coming to grips with networks and the surveillance state, but it seem like nobody is behind the curtain but the network itself. Hello SkyNet! …or is it the Borg?
So what is the deal here? The key to Mr. Auerbach’s book is that the large digital networks that he focuses on are large and extremely complex systems whose nature is not to stabilize but to become more and more complex. That does not mean there is no order to these “meganets” but rather that the order which becomes apparent in the meganets is apparent only a vastly more “macro” level than that of any of the human or human associations who contribute to the meganets. Think of it like the weather (an association Mr. Auerbach makes frequently). All we can really hope to do is see the macro events with sufficient clarity that we can take steps towards limited mitigation, but control of the meganets is not on offer and is unlikely to ever be possible.
What kind of mitigation? Paradoxically, by introducing more chaos into the meganets, it may be possible to dampen the extremes that arise and thus limit the extent of damages that arise - or such is the claim. The computer analog to cloud seeding is unclear to me but this approach to the “what can we do about Meganets” question is one of the highlights of the book.
I liked the emphasis on the uncontrollability of Meganets. There has long been an excessive belief, bordering in dogma, that vast transactional networks (markets, for example) could not be actively managed (until they could be, of course) but that in any event things would turn out for the better for all by and large because the market was a better albeit decentralized decision maker than the state could be. That soothing song of the free marketers works well in church or business schools but the attention to the Fed and to globalization, along with the growth and importance of the Chinese state, makes it clear that we still believe in macro-manageability of politics and economies. Non-ergotic systems are far more plausible as the nemesis that we are really dealing with.
Having said that, I admit to being troubled by the “we cannot control any of this” focus of the book. If the book was instead about how we will be overwhelmed by Meganets and then eventually die, it would hardly be any more pessimistic than it already is. There is always room for local action - at the appropriate scale, of course. There is nothing wrong with tamping down our policy hubris to note that and then moving ahead with what is possible.
More troublesome still is Auerbach’s emphasis on the enfeebling effects of meganets and networks more generally such that our intellectual and cultural identities themselves become even more programmed and routinized than they are already. This then sets us up to be conquered by Artificial Intelligence. The problem with ChatGPT is not how well it works but how impoverished human thinking has become such that ChatGPT can write better than many students and adults, even while knowing nothing about what it writes. Maybe it is like in Pogo - we have met the enemy and he is us.
The fatalism of the book struck me as a bit too convenient, but it is still worth reading.
So what is the deal here? The key to Mr. Auerbach’s book is that the large digital networks that he focuses on are large and extremely complex systems whose nature is not to stabilize but to become more and more complex. That does not mean there is no order to these “meganets” but rather that the order which becomes apparent in the meganets is apparent only a vastly more “macro” level than that of any of the human or human associations who contribute to the meganets. Think of it like the weather (an association Mr. Auerbach makes frequently). All we can really hope to do is see the macro events with sufficient clarity that we can take steps towards limited mitigation, but control of the meganets is not on offer and is unlikely to ever be possible.
What kind of mitigation? Paradoxically, by introducing more chaos into the meganets, it may be possible to dampen the extremes that arise and thus limit the extent of damages that arise - or such is the claim. The computer analog to cloud seeding is unclear to me but this approach to the “what can we do about Meganets” question is one of the highlights of the book.
I liked the emphasis on the uncontrollability of Meganets. There has long been an excessive belief, bordering in dogma, that vast transactional networks (markets, for example) could not be actively managed (until they could be, of course) but that in any event things would turn out for the better for all by and large because the market was a better albeit decentralized decision maker than the state could be. That soothing song of the free marketers works well in church or business schools but the attention to the Fed and to globalization, along with the growth and importance of the Chinese state, makes it clear that we still believe in macro-manageability of politics and economies. Non-ergotic systems are far more plausible as the nemesis that we are really dealing with.
Having said that, I admit to being troubled by the “we cannot control any of this” focus of the book. If the book was instead about how we will be overwhelmed by Meganets and then eventually die, it would hardly be any more pessimistic than it already is. There is always room for local action - at the appropriate scale, of course. There is nothing wrong with tamping down our policy hubris to note that and then moving ahead with what is possible.
More troublesome still is Auerbach’s emphasis on the enfeebling effects of meganets and networks more generally such that our intellectual and cultural identities themselves become even more programmed and routinized than they are already. This then sets us up to be conquered by Artificial Intelligence. The problem with ChatGPT is not how well it works but how impoverished human thinking has become such that ChatGPT can write better than many students and adults, even while knowing nothing about what it writes. Maybe it is like in Pogo - we have met the enemy and he is us.
The fatalism of the book struck me as a bit too convenient, but it is still worth reading.
August 26, 2023
The author, a former Microsoft and Google software engineer, uses this term to describe a network of software, the organizations that depend on it, and the users who generate content for it. A "Meganet" is neither wholly machine or wholly human but rather an uncontrollable combination that threatens the stability of society.
What follows is a good summary of key issues and the attempts to control the spread of meganets. I learned a lot from his description of India's Aadhaar universal ID and many other examples, including China's social credit system, all of which he describes in more detail than I've found in other places.
But his recommendations, that we should deliberately inject hindrances to the technology ("poison the well"), are unsatisfying. He loses me too when casually blames it all on misinformation with apparently little curiosity as to why he and his dear readers happen to be immune to such threats. He takes it for granted that the stupid masses believe whatever is shoved in front of them while you and I of course, can spot the lies a mile away.
I couldn't find references to Martin Gurri, Andrey Mir, or others whose arguments are to me, more insightful by showing that our modern hyperconnectivity ("Meganets") is raising the relative power of normal people at the expense of the elites. It's this threat that must be addressed, not the author's focus on the technology behind it.
What follows is a good summary of key issues and the attempts to control the spread of meganets. I learned a lot from his description of India's Aadhaar universal ID and many other examples, including China's social credit system, all of which he describes in more detail than I've found in other places.
But his recommendations, that we should deliberately inject hindrances to the technology ("poison the well"), are unsatisfying. He loses me too when casually blames it all on misinformation with apparently little curiosity as to why he and his dear readers happen to be immune to such threats. He takes it for granted that the stupid masses believe whatever is shoved in front of them while you and I of course, can spot the lies a mile away.
I couldn't find references to Martin Gurri, Andrey Mir, or others whose arguments are to me, more insightful by showing that our modern hyperconnectivity ("Meganets") is raising the relative power of normal people at the expense of the elites. It's this threat that must be addressed, not the author's focus on the technology behind it.
November 23, 2024
Author tries to speak into existence the term “meganet.” The problem here is the term is not defined and basically assumed to encompass a wide pass of technologies including search, social media, AdWords, deep learning, artificial intelligence, news outlets, non-fungible tokens, blockchains, and many more digital technologies.
Most of the book seemed to be a collection of anecdotal stories about organizations, countries, and campaigns using technologies, both successfully as well as challenges in managing them.
When I hear statements like “private blockchains are just a database”, I cannot take this work seriously. I’m surprised the author did not research more in depth. He may have found a very limited body of research around the concept of a “meganet” vs. a much larger body of work around AI, blockchain, networking, and social media.
We are repeatedly reminded the author was a programmer at Microsoft and Google. The irony here is I could not determine if this was a “humble brag” or an admission of guilt for his part in creating unmanageable systems.
Regardless I’m glad the book was written and the topic of networks, connected societies, social media, and security is worthy of scientific study albeit not under the forced banner of “meganets.”
Most of the book seemed to be a collection of anecdotal stories about organizations, countries, and campaigns using technologies, both successfully as well as challenges in managing them.
When I hear statements like “private blockchains are just a database”, I cannot take this work seriously. I’m surprised the author did not research more in depth. He may have found a very limited body of research around the concept of a “meganet” vs. a much larger body of work around AI, blockchain, networking, and social media.
We are repeatedly reminded the author was a programmer at Microsoft and Google. The irony here is I could not determine if this was a “humble brag” or an admission of guilt for his part in creating unmanageable systems.
Regardless I’m glad the book was written and the topic of networks, connected societies, social media, and security is worthy of scientific study albeit not under the forced banner of “meganets.”
May 2, 2023
Meganets: How Digital Forces Beyond our Control Commandeer our Daily Lives and Inner Realities by David B. Auerbach is a look at our current and potential future interconnectedness through the internet.
What is a Meganet? According to Auerbach, “A mega net is a persistent, evolving, and opaque data network that controls how we see the world. Whether it uses AI or heuristics, whether it describes people, money, or products…” In essence, the internet, once created, became a force of its own. No matter how much a company like Facebook, Google, and others might want to “control” it or “control the narrative”, it can’t.
In addition to social media, our world is becoming increasingly interconnected. Online currencies such as Bitcoin, while not in expansive use, are here to stay. In places like India and China, government issued connected identity cards are already being used.
If you’re interested in a deeper understanding of our current world, I recommend this book to you. While I had a basic knowledge of most of these “meganets”, I was able to take away a changed perspective on how these networks become bigger than the original programming.
What is a Meganet? According to Auerbach, “A mega net is a persistent, evolving, and opaque data network that controls how we see the world. Whether it uses AI or heuristics, whether it describes people, money, or products…” In essence, the internet, once created, became a force of its own. No matter how much a company like Facebook, Google, and others might want to “control” it or “control the narrative”, it can’t.
In addition to social media, our world is becoming increasingly interconnected. Online currencies such as Bitcoin, while not in expansive use, are here to stay. In places like India and China, government issued connected identity cards are already being used.
If you’re interested in a deeper understanding of our current world, I recommend this book to you. While I had a basic knowledge of most of these “meganets”, I was able to take away a changed perspective on how these networks become bigger than the original programming.
August 18, 2023
TL;DR tech-powered networks (meganets) of data, people, products and money have gotten so big and complex that we are no longer able to control them.
Meganets are defined as "persistent, evolving, and opaque data networks that control how we see the world."
The author takes us on a journey from Facebook to Google to the Metaverse to Cryptocurrencies to Artificial Intelligence, unpacking how we got to where we are today.
He suggests the following "solutions" to deal with the growing "problem" of meganets:
1. Injecting unfamiliar participants and elements into virtual communities
2. Randomizing and decentralizing meganet control mechanisms such as recommendation engines, ranking algorithms, and advertisement targeting
3. Intentionally “tainting” or “polluting” large meganet data stores and AIs with random garbage data
4. Breaking up and/or dispersing long-standing virtual communities
5. Creating and encouraging participation in new, heterogeneous virtual communities
6. Involving end users in correcting and dehomogenizing data and analytics
The book ends with a take on where we are heading into the future.
Meganets are defined as "persistent, evolving, and opaque data networks that control how we see the world."
The author takes us on a journey from Facebook to Google to the Metaverse to Cryptocurrencies to Artificial Intelligence, unpacking how we got to where we are today.
He suggests the following "solutions" to deal with the growing "problem" of meganets:
1. Injecting unfamiliar participants and elements into virtual communities
2. Randomizing and decentralizing meganet control mechanisms such as recommendation engines, ranking algorithms, and advertisement targeting
3. Intentionally “tainting” or “polluting” large meganet data stores and AIs with random garbage data
4. Breaking up and/or dispersing long-standing virtual communities
5. Creating and encouraging participation in new, heterogeneous virtual communities
6. Involving end users in correcting and dehomogenizing data and analytics
The book ends with a take on where we are heading into the future.
June 25, 2024
Conceptually, this book is solid. I think it sufficiently nails home Auerbach's concept of the meganet. One imagines the meganet to be a lovecraftian horror, utterly incomprehensible to man.
I am not convinced by his suggested solutions but he rightly surmises that few people would be. I am not sure how we would arrive at any solutions to the meganets problems - advertising and grouping people is too lucrative to give up and I think people would rightly complain if their communities were broken up. My own opinion is that there is no possible "working" solution that will be agreed upon and that it will simply continue to get worse and devolve more and more as time goes on.
I think those who wish to avoid the meganet's content directly will coalesce around the "small web" and "digital gardens" as they are already starting to, though they will still be caught up in it's vast surveillance and data collecting. The web needs to re-decentralize instead of orbiting around the biggest players to have any hopes of mitigating the effects of the meganet. But this is as unlikely a solutions as the authors.
I am not convinced by his suggested solutions but he rightly surmises that few people would be. I am not sure how we would arrive at any solutions to the meganets problems - advertising and grouping people is too lucrative to give up and I think people would rightly complain if their communities were broken up. My own opinion is that there is no possible "working" solution that will be agreed upon and that it will simply continue to get worse and devolve more and more as time goes on.
I think those who wish to avoid the meganet's content directly will coalesce around the "small web" and "digital gardens" as they are already starting to, though they will still be caught up in it's vast surveillance and data collecting. The web needs to re-decentralize instead of orbiting around the biggest players to have any hopes of mitigating the effects of the meganet. But this is as unlikely a solutions as the authors.
July 16, 2025
I should have known by now, the longer the intro, the worse the book. He doesn't know how to start a book or end one. He does know how to say 'meganets' though. 13 times in a three minute slot (audiobook), and that may be a low count for other sections. Maybe reading it instead of hearing it wouldn't be so ANNOYING, but man, talk about overusing a word!
The first half was decent, and then he put on his political hat and hopped on his soapbox. Apparently, anything he disagrees with is 'fake news'. The book is too long, FAR too repetitive, and too politically biased. I swear, the next book with a long intro, I am just going to save myself the trouble.
Edit it; chop out the many 100s (1000s?) of 'meganets', shorten it, drop all the political crap and snide digs, and you'd probably have a decent book. As it stands, it is a bad book. I really struggled to finish.
The first half was decent, and then he put on his political hat and hopped on his soapbox. Apparently, anything he disagrees with is 'fake news'. The book is too long, FAR too repetitive, and too politically biased. I swear, the next book with a long intro, I am just going to save myself the trouble.
Edit it; chop out the many 100s (1000s?) of 'meganets', shorten it, drop all the political crap and snide digs, and you'd probably have a decent book. As it stands, it is a bad book. I really struggled to finish.
January 12, 2025
Auerbach shares on the nature of the Meganets (like Amazon/Reddit/Google/Meta-Facebook) that they are semiautonomous systems and highly feedback driven. They are ultimately beyond our human control and we can only fight fire with fire, slow them down. He shares more on how they make us more tribal, the evolving business models of Facebook and Google towards the metaverse, how AI will accelerate the meganets. Also noteworthy is the comparison between India's digital ID system (Aadhaar) and China (PRC)'s social credit system.
April 12, 2023
Though it goes a little deep into technical specifics, I really enjoyed learning about the idea of meganets and how to live with / combat them. The book is part philosophy, part knowledge-sharing, and part prediction / problem solving. It's not for everyone, but Meganets is absolutely worth your time and attention if you're in tech or especially interested in the Big Tech space.
July 26, 2023
book uses a lot of examples, most of which I was already aware of. I thought that the book would go into more technical details of meganets and deep learning and explain the GPT phenomenon - eg using deep learning to explain the workings of an individual neuron (GPT - NN), but it didn't touch these interesting topics. It is more for developing intuition about the meganets through examples.
September 4, 2023
Should think of this book every time I’m ten percent through a book and find its value extremely low, then stop reading. Learned a tiny bit about artificial intelligence systems, otherwise this book was like an old family friend that doesn’t get out much and feels a need to impart stories and make up for all the time they don’t get a chance to speak by continuing even though its uninteresting.
December 19, 2023
I liked the way the book was written - the author did not try to confuse the reader by being too technical, instead explained everything really well and also explained how the particular issue impacts everyone. Some parts were a little boring, so I am giving it three stars overall, but it is a 3,5* book i'd say.
September 29, 2024
This work explores the limitations of technology. It does so by evaluating the new digital tools of today and how they serve and disrupt society. Often the loss of control goes unnoticed. It's catchy to say Facebook can't control misinformation, but this work explains the dilemma without exhaustive or esoteric technical details.
March 14, 2024
I don't know. Definitely needs a re-read. There is a feeling of dread throughout the reading with little signs of hope. The chapter on solutions is scarce compared to the rest. A difficult read. Maybe a doomsday warning.
May 13, 2023
So much to think about.
August 9, 2023
Essential Reading
December 30, 2023
4.5 stars
June 5, 2023
Superficial analysis that tries hard to sell itself as insightful. A waste of time and highly likely to be DNF'd.
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