Book Review: ‘Meganets,’ by David B. Auerbach

Along with all the literature about “unplugging” or learning “How to Do Nothing,” as Jenny Odell titled her flower-festooned 2019 best seller, “Meganets” made me feel deeply queasy about the amount of time I spend on Instagram, Reddit, TikTok and Twitter. Not Facebook, never Facebook — “a fount of misinformation,” as Auerbach calls it, “a petri dish in which false facts and crazy theories grow, mutate and metastasize” — except for the burner account I use occasionally to see what exes are up to.

When my tiny, “private” Instagram account was hacked last year by an enterprising bitcoin entrepreneur in a faraway land, I went into full-blown panic — especially after a nameless entity at Insta requested and then rejected a series of slow-mo video selfies, tilting head to the ceiling even, to verify my account.

Was this the experience of a validation addict going through withdrawal? No, let’s reframe: I was trapped in a meganet (especially now that Facebook’s parent company, Meta, owns Insta): a middle-aged mermaid thrashing about in the great online ocean as data floated around me, multiplying like plankton.

A Gen Xer might well feel at sea too in Auerbach’s extensive chapter about cryptocurrency. “Reality bites,” we naïvely thought, but here “reality forks,” with blockchain doubling back on itself like a caterpillar.“No Rosseau-esque ‘General Will’ emerges from the bugs and forks,” is the takeaway.

Auerbach is as at home with literature and philosophy as in the engine room, quoting Kenneth Burke, George Trow and Shakespeare (in a discussion of artificial intelligence’s inability to determine the authorship of the Elizabethan play “Arden of Faversham”). “I have waited more than five years for Amazon to notify me of an available copy of Grigol Robakidze’s novel ‘The Snake’s Skin,’” he writes, “supposedly published in 2015” — this would be a reissue of a 1928 Georgian modernist classic that does sound fascinating — “but I will never get that notification because the book’s Amazon page is in reality a tombstone for a book that never existed.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/19/books/review/meganets-david-auerbach-review.html