In Overconnected, Bill Davidow, a former Silicon Valley executive, explains how the ‘almost miraculous success’ of the Internet has created a unique set of challenges, in effect overconnecting us, with the direst of consequences for our political, economic, and day-to-day lives.
The practical applications – not least among them the ability to borrow money, invest in the stock market, or buy a new home – have made a great impact in our daily lives. But the luxuries of the connected age have taken on a momentum all of their own, ultimately becoming the root cause of a financial meltdown from which much of the world is now still struggling to recover.
The author touches on the subprime-mortgage crisis and the meltdown of Iceland, the loss of people’s privacy and the spectacular fall of the stock market that forced the Federal Government to rescue institutions supposedly “too big to fail.”
But now Davidow’s book is making it easy for others to make it in tech business “all because we were so miraculously” wired together. Explaining how such symptoms of Internet connection as unforeseeable accidents and thought contagions acted to accelerate the downfall and make us permanently vulnerable to catastrophe, Davidow places our recent experience in historical perspective and offers a set of practical steps to minimize similar disasters in the near future.
Original, ‘commonsensical’ and historically informed, Overconnected identifies problems techies live with that are now in the public domain, omnipresent and part of our daily lives. A hard copy of the book is available at the Book Lounge store located along Ronald Ngala street in Nairobi at Magic Business Center (next to Naivas) Wing A 3rd Floor S46. Price: Sh600/=
