Smokey Maverick

Book: delete
By: Viktor Mayer-Schonberger

Been some time since I’ve last done a Book Buzz post. With changing projects from Lansing MI to Charleston WV, my podcast listening has experienced a boom, while unfortunately my reading rate has suffered. No longer can I churn through books on weekly flights, and while audiobooks are good, I can’t take notes or ear-mark passages while taking curves along I-79 at 80mph.

I picked up delete at a Barnes and Nobles a few months ago just because it looked interesting – didn’t do much research on it beforehand. It has it’s share of noteworthy points, but failed to hold my interest for most of the time. The general premise is that, as technology grows and provides us with countless perks, few stop to consider what they might be giving up to gain said perks. Slowly, we are starting to realize that remembering everything, and having almost any piece of (personal) information at anyone’s fingertips improves our societies connectivity, but also slices deeply into our privacy.

Final Take: I wouldn’t recommend this for anyone else to read. Book could’ve been only 50 pages long and still conveyed the same message – author continuously pounded the exact same points.

Some interesting points from delete:

• “…should everyone who self-discloses information lose control over that information forever, and have no say about whether and when the Internet forgets this information? Do we want a future that is forever unforgiving because it is unforgetting?” [pg 4]
• “Once we have perfect memories, Borges suggests, we are no longer able to generalize and abstract, and we remain lost in the details of our past.” [pg 12]
• Highlights a woman, named AJ, who literally remembers everything. “…remembering everything is both maddening and lonely… She leads a relatively normal life, but spends an unusual amount of time immersed in her past rather than enjoying the present.” [pg 21]
• “As I have mentioned two out of three teenagers in the United States use the Internet to create and share information with others. They enjoy the vast benefits of what economists have termed network externalities – every new user joining to share information increases the value for all existing users” [pg 85] This is exactly what has caused Twitter to explode from a small, fringe web app to a viable new form of communication.
• Very interesting story on how the Dutch government created a personal information DB in the 1930’s with the aim to facilitate government administration and plan out welfare. Then the Nazi’s invaded and captured the DB, using the same information to “identify, deport and murder a much higher percentage (73%) of he Dutch Jewish population than in Belgium (40%), France (25%), or any other European nation.” [pg 141]
• End of the book, details what would be one solution to this potential problem – associating an expiration date with every piece of information as a type of meta-data, that would self-destruct the information once that date came to pass.

Tags:   Book Buzz · delete · Viktor Mayer-Schonberger4 Comments