Book Brief: Unwired

Gaining Control over Addictive Technologies

Brief Summary

Title: Unwired: Gaining Control over Addictive Technologies
Author: Gaia Bernstein
Published: 2023 by Cambridge University Press
What It Teaches: Gaia Bernstein is a law professor who has experienced the addictive dangers of technology and has feared the impacts on herself and her children. After many years of battling this monster, she has reached the conclusion that the solution does not lie in self regulation (either individuals mastering their habits, or the tech industry implementing prominent but ineffective solutions) but rather in forcing the tech industry to stop abusing its users. In Unwired, she teaches about these abuses, the impacts they have on individuals and families, and how the battle to stop them will likely play out.
When To Use It: Unwired is both an alarm warning us of danger, and a clarion call to action. You might want to read this book if you have any concern about how technology is negatively impacting our lives and/or if you want to join the fight to address the problem.

Brief Review

I received a free advance copy of this book from the publicists promoting it in exchange for an honest review.

Gaia Bernstein started using a smartphone and social networks around 2009 when such tools started to become popular. She wasn’t aware that these potentially helpful tools were designed to be addictive. She didn’t choose to expose massive amounts of personal data about herself to strangers. She simply wanted to connect with people. She didn’t plan to expose her three kids to potentially addictive technologies and loss of privacy. She simply let them interact with their peers in the ways that had become common and expected.

Around 2015, she started to realize that these technologies had become a problem, not just for her and her family, but for virtually all of our modern society. She wanted to do something about it, so she studied ways to take control over her life and her family’s use of technology. As a law professor, she had a platform to share what she learned and she began speaking to audiences of other parents. In time, she came to realize that self-control was an illusion. As long as our only choice is to use the tools in the way that they have been designed, which is to exploit our personal data and to hook us with addictive design patterns, we cannot avoid the consequences. Perhaps we can minimize them, but we cannot escape them.

This book is her attempt to overcome this dilemma. She believes that the technology companies making these products need to be compelled to change how they operate. She realizes this is easier said than done. She looks to examples from the tobacco industry and the junk food industry to see what approaches have worked (or not) in the past, and how threatened companies have responded. As a lawyer and law professor, she is able to explain the legal basis for different approaches (especially regulatory and through class action lawsuits) and why different defenses work and where they are vulnerable.

As I write this review the Supreme Court is considering two cases that demonstrate how hard it will be to bring about significant changes in how the tech industry operates. These cases don’t specifically address the abuses on which Bernstein is focused, and yet the soundbites coming out of the hearings show why using the courts to change how big tech works will be difficult. Justice Elena Kagan described herself and her peers: “You know, these are not, like, the nine greatest experts on the internet.” Later she implied that it would be hard to change how tech companies work without breaking the Internet itself: “algorithms are endemic to the internet, that every time anybody looks at anything on the internet, there is an algorithm involved.”

As hard as it is, this is an important fight. As Bernstein puts it: “The dangers of neglect are always amplified when combined with abuse. This is where our children are at. We have a choice whether to fight for them or to neglect them to face abuse on their own, in classrooms and bedrooms, trapped by the tech industry’s abusive designs.”

But it’s a long and hard fight. I can’t win this fight. You can’t win this fight. Bernstein can’t win this fight. It will take a broad organized effort. My frustration with Unwired is that I don’t feel it is going anywhere. Bernstein makes the same argument over and over until it almost becomes tedious. She explains legal approaches that might work (and why they might not). She explains how hard it will be. The last lines of the book clearly state the situation: “Like the tobacco and food industries, the tech industry is unlikely to submit to change without a fight. But knowing all we know now, neither should we.” And yet, she doesn’t tell us how we can practically join the fight.

Also, although she hints at it, she never tells us what the fight will cost us. One of my startups was a social network that wanted to be different by protecting privacy and not abusing its members as Facebook and others did. The startup failed to gain traction. Since we couldn’t make money through advertising, we charged a fee. A competitor’s free offer is hard to beat when you are charging for yours. Winning this fight will mean the end of the free Internet — free search, free content, free social networks, free e-mail. “Freedom isn’t free” was coined to describe the sacrifices made to ensure our democratic freedom, but it also applies here. Are we willing to pay the upfront cost to win this battle and the ongoing cost of paying for services that previously have been free? That’s a big ask that I fear most will answer with “no”.

It will take more than a well written book to bring about significant change in the Internet economy.

Bottom Line: Unwired makes a compelling case for challenging the abusive and addictive models underlying our modern tech-driven economy and even explains the legal and regulatory strategies that could be used. I wish I believed it would actually lead to real change.