The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives (Vintage)
If prominence correlates with the attention paid to a prognosticator, there will be great interest in the outlook for the Internet, according to Google executive Schmidt. With Cohen, Schmidt addresses incipient trends in an individual’s engagement with the Internet to introduce his main subject, how nation-states and businesses will capitalize or cope with the velocity, connectivity, and mutation of the Internet. In the authors’ analysis, governments and companies face in the virtual world, as they have in the physical world, an intelligence challenge. Referencing Internet incidents galore, they warn of a perpetual “code war” between attackers and defenders and expand upon this type of conflict within authoritarian and democratic states. Citing the Arab Spring as an example, Schmidt and Cohen predict that its online propagation presages an easier initiation of future revolutions, which nevertheless face uncertain outcomes when they encounter, as they eventually must, the material powers of a state. Peering forward to the Internet’s influence on international affairs, this work of futurology combines optimism and pessimism in an informed and levelheaded presentation. --Gilbert Taylor--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.