A review by blats
Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society by Ronald J. Deibert
3.0
This is an important book to capture the modern concerns on the effects of technology on society across the planet.
I feel everyone in government, especially those in democratic countries need to read this book. It does not matter if the government employee directly works with technology the impacts will certainly be present.
It is hard to come away from this book with anything actionable. The unfortunate scenario is our society has become deeply integrated into the internet, making it extremely difficult to even reduce participation.
What the book does offer is awareness. Awareness of how our choices and actions matter with respect to engagement with social media and "always on" digital devices.
In the past few months I have found myself drifting away from engaging in social media. I rarely post on instagram or facebook. I have mitigated my mindless scrolling through the "Digital Wellbeing" app that limits use outside of 5am-4pm and time caps use per app. At home I have Pihole DNS servers that block ads and trackers (also have unbound DNS resolver) with wireguard VPN to use the servers when not at home.
Still looking to gradually reduce my participation through use of DuckDuckGo for web searches and Signal for messaging.
One area I found disingenuous was the section on the environmental impact. The claims of CO2 impact per email assumes we are using carbon generating electricity sources, my province is primarily nuclear supplemented with gas (not good), solar and wind - coal plants have all been shutdown. Also the water usage by data centres appears to be claiming that the freshwater is consumed rather than returned to the environment. My understanding is water usage for data centres like nuclear power plants is for cooling heat exchangers and is returned to the environment with an increased temperature.
I feel everyone in government, especially those in democratic countries need to read this book. It does not matter if the government employee directly works with technology the impacts will certainly be present.
It is hard to come away from this book with anything actionable. The unfortunate scenario is our society has become deeply integrated into the internet, making it extremely difficult to even reduce participation.
What the book does offer is awareness. Awareness of how our choices and actions matter with respect to engagement with social media and "always on" digital devices.
In the past few months I have found myself drifting away from engaging in social media. I rarely post on instagram or facebook. I have mitigated my mindless scrolling through the "Digital Wellbeing" app that limits use outside of 5am-4pm and time caps use per app. At home I have Pihole DNS servers that block ads and trackers (also have unbound DNS resolver) with wireguard VPN to use the servers when not at home.
Still looking to gradually reduce my participation through use of DuckDuckGo for web searches and Signal for messaging.
One area I found disingenuous was the section on the environmental impact. The claims of CO2 impact per email assumes we are using carbon generating electricity sources, my province is primarily nuclear supplemented with gas (not good), solar and wind - coal plants have all been shutdown. Also the water usage by data centres appears to be claiming that the freshwater is consumed rather than returned to the environment. My understanding is water usage for data centres like nuclear power plants is for cooling heat exchangers and is returned to the environment with an increased temperature.