Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy

by George Gilder

A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE MONTH

FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: "Nothing Mr. Gilder says or writes is ever delivered at anything less than the fullest philosophical decibel... Mr. Gilder sounds less like a tech guru than a poet, and his words tumble out in a romantic cascade."

“Google’s algorithms assume the world’s future is nothing more than the next moment in a random process. George Gilder shows how deep this assumption goes, what motivates people to make it, and why it’s wrong: the future depends on human action.” — Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies and author of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

The Age of Google, built on big data and machine intelligence, has been an awesome era. But it’s coming to an end. In Life after Google, George Gilder—the peerless visionary of technology and culture—explains why Silicon Valley is suffering a nervous breakdown and what to expect as the post-Google age dawns.

Google’s astonishing ability to “search and sort” attracts the entire world to its search engine and countless other goodies—videos, maps, email, calendars….And everything it offers is free, or so it seems. Instead of paying directly, users submit to advertising. The system of “aggregate and advertise” works—for a while—if you control an empire of data centers, but a market without prices strangles entrepreneurship and turns the Internet into a wasteland of ads.

The crisis is not just economic. Even as advances in artificial intelligence induce delusions of omnipotence and transcendence, Silicon Valley has pretty much given up on security. The Internet firewalls supposedly protecting all those passwords and personal information have proved hopelessly permeable.

The crisis cannot be solved within the current computer and network architecture. The future lies with the “cryptocosm”—the new architecture of the blockchain and its derivatives. Enabling cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether, NEO and Hashgraph, it will provide the Internet a secure global payments system, ending the aggregate-and-advertise Age of Google.

Silicon Valley, long dominated by a few giants, faces a “great unbundling,” which will disperse computer power and commerce and transform the economy and the Internet.

Life after Google is almost here.

 

For fans of "Wealth and Poverty," "Knowledge and Power," and "The Scandal of Money." 

• ISBN10: 1621575764
• ISBN13: 9781621575764
• Publish Date: 2 August 2018 (first published 17 July 2018)
• Publish Status: Transferred
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Regnery Publishing Inc
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 256
• Language: English

Reviews

[viking2917]

God what a bad book. It's rambling with no coherent thesis, often borderline incoherent, unless it is something like "Google is going to be killed by Bitcoin and the blockchain BECAUSE PRIVACY". Which makes about as a much sense as saying "TV is going to be killed by Gold BECAUSE INFLATION" - they just don't have much to do with each other.

There are periodically good insights but they never seem to go anywhere, and the book is filled with either assertions that are entirely dubious or factually false. For example:

"If your product is free, it is not a product, and you are not in business, even if you can extort money from so-called advertisers to fund it. " - Where to start with this idiocy? Google does indeed have customers that pay them gazillions of dollars - it's just not those of us pushing the search button. They are not extorting advertisers, the advertisers are throwing money at them because it works. This is just stupid.

He then proceeds to attribute the saying "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product" to Tim Cook. I'm sorry, Tim Cook has said something like this but he did not invent this phrase. It's just incorrect.

I'm a technologist - I understand the concepts we're dealing with here, so this isn't based on not understanding the basics, the book is just a rambling mess. I'm probably sympathetic to much of his worldview, I'm sympathetic to his outlook that the big guys aren't good for our privacy, and sympathetic to his indictment of the current higher education situation, but this book doesn't really establish that cryptocurrency and the blockchain are the solution.

If you want to understand bitcoin, save your money and just google some bitcoin 101 web posts.