Scarier than fiction

This was the year tech dystopia nonfiction took over Paul Taunton

Spoiler alert, the biggest trend in books during 2017 was U. S. President Donald Trump.

There were books on who and what predicted Trump; books rushed to publication to analyze the rise of Trump and the early days of his presidency; books whose marketing points were modified to address Trump (“Never more relevant!”); old books that took on a new profile ( Orwell, Atwood) in the emerging Trump era.

But adjacent to the consuming Trump narrative, there have been other important trends in publishing. A renewed concern with civil and human rights, for example, or a spotlight on a free press and economic disparity. And more and more, inspired writing on the place where it all increasingly plays out: the internet.

Zöe Quinn’s Crash Override is a look back at GamerGate from one of its principal targets, and a suggested a way forward from online mobbing. Adam Alter’s Irresistible examines the methods that keep us refreshing our screens, while the stultifying long- term effects on our children is explored in Jean M. Twenge’s iGen.

But two 2017 books took an even broader view – or paradoxically, a narrow one – with a focus on only a handful of players: the socalled FANG companies (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google), as well as Apple. Former New Republic editor Franklin Foer’s World Without Mind is ably summed up by its subtitle, The Existential Threat of Big Tech; while Scott Galloway’s The Four is a more pragmatic, if whimsically depressing analysis of the intents and trajectories of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. ( The New York Times’s Farhad Manjoo swaps Netflix for Microsoft in his version of the above, the “Frightful Five.”)

Writers – whether their focus is tech, economics, politics or culture – are increasingly grappling with the demise of internet as free, as enabling, as an exploder of gatekeepers and monopolies. In his recent essay The Death of the Internet, the Outline’s Joshua Topolsky stresses how dangerous this is – alongside the simultaneous rise of trolls, and the “gamified” internet of likes, shares, achievements and rewards – because the internet “is” real life. He describes markets where Facebook “is” the internet ( You’ve got Facemail!) as a warning sign. And on his podcast Tomorrow, co- host Ryan Houlihan describes an already daily reality where “I use Google, Facebook, and then Amazon Web Services runs everything else.” They sum it up nicely when they joke about nascent Virtual Reality as “this world of infinite possibilities – but only one corporation.”

Sometimes the tech giants seem so monolithic that in the imagination they all merge into one villain, despite being in fierce competition among themselves. Silicon Valley, in this sense, is an oligopoly of frenemies. And the coverage starts to resemble dystopian fiction itself – and a weird sort of hatereading pleasure. It’s tempting to make a New Year’s resolution to stop spending so much time online reading about spending so much time online.

The reality of the changing internet may be less dramatic for many of us, with the end of net neutrality instead turning the quotidian web into commercial aviation, with varying service levels, elusive loyalty rewards and parcelled- out pricing for whatever the online equivalent of a snack pack or two inches of legroom is.

Foer’s book is more the former, and Galloway’s more the latter. But that doesn’t make the changes described by either less insidious.

So what’s the benefit of books on a topic that already consumes every 24- hour news cycle? It’s not print romanticism. It is that they are book- length, though. In order to finish them, you need a few sittings – which means you may actually have considered them in the interim. Even if you disagree with points therein, they are more than a hot take to be instantly discarded, or worse, shared but unread. And of course, as long as you’re not on a second screen, they give you an offline break.

The internet will be there when you get back. It’ ll just probably be worse.

WRITERS ARE GRAPPLING WITH THE DEMISE OF THE INTERNET AS FREE, ENABLING AND AN EXPLODER OF GATEKEEPERS.