Techlash: Who Makes the Rules in the Digital Gilded Age?

Tom Wheeler

doi:10.5771/9780815739944

Summary

Hailed by Publishers Weekly as "a potent primer on the need to rein in big tech" and Kirkus Reviews as "a rock-solid plan for controlling the tech giants," readers will be energized by Tom Wheeler's vision of digital governance.

Featured on Barack Obama's 11/3/23 list of "What I’m Reading on the Rise of Artificial Intelligence"

An accessible and visionary book that connects the experiences of the late 19th century’s industrial Gilded Age with its echoes in the 21st century digital Gilded Age.

Hailed by Ken Burns as one of the foremost “explainers” of technology and its effect throughout history, Tom Wheeler now turns his gaze to the public impact of entrepreneurial innovation. In Techlash, he connects the experiences of the late 19th century’s industrial Gilded Age with its echoes in the 21st century digital Gilded Age. In both cases, technology innovation and the great wealth that it created ran up against the public interest and the rights of others. As with the industrial revolution and the Gilded Age that it created, new digital technology has changed commerce and culture, creating great wealth in the process, all while being essentially unsupervised.

Warning that today is not the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” some envision, Wheeler calls for a new era of public interest oversight that leaves behind industrial era regulatory ideas to embrace a new process of agile, supervised and enforced code setting that protects consumers and competition while encouraging continued innovation. Wheeler combines insights from his experience at the highest echelons of business and government to create a compelling portrait of the need to balance entrepreneurial innovation with the public good.

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Bibliographic data

Edition: 1/2023
Copyright year: 2023
ISBN-Print: 978-0-8157-3993-7
ISBN-Online: 978-0-8157-3994-4
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 234
Product type: Book Titles

1. Contents No access
2. Preface No access
1. Echoes of the Gilded Age No access
2. This Is NOT the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” No access
3. Closing the Open Internet No access
1. The Metaverse No access
2. Artificial Intelligence No access
1. When Innovators Make the Rules No access
2. The World’s Greatest Business Model No access
3. Where Is the Watchdog? No access
1. Designing Behavioral Expectations No access
2. Privacy by Design No access
3. Competition by Design No access
4. Truth and Trust by Design No access
1. Time to Make History Again No access
Acknowledgments No access Pages 189 - 190
Notes No access Pages 191 - 218
Index No access Pages 219 - 232
About the Author No access Pages 233 - 234