Boston Book Festival 2019

In his seminal 1983 book Technologies of Freedom, Ithiel de Sola Pool declared that electronic technology is conducive to freedom. Thirty-five years later, we worry that George Orwell’s vision may have been closer to the truth. Shoshana Zuboff’s brilliant work, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, points to how companies like Google and Facebook catalog our every move, emotion, desire, and even utterance, and then sell it to companies so they can predict and control our behavior. We give up the data gladly in return for convenience and the sometimes illusory promise of social connection. Roger McNamee, in Zucked, sounds a warning as he chronicles the optimism he experienced as an early investor in Facebook and his bitter disappointment when it became clear to him that Facebook has a decidedly dark underbelly. This chilling and necessary consideration of the technologies that surround us will be moderated by Meghna Chakrabarti, host of WBUR’s On Point.