Our students and social workers have been enthralled by The Wall Street Journal investigative project titled "The Facebook Files," particularly sections about the known negative impact of Instagram on teenage girls. If you are, too, then look for SYSTEM ERROR by Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, and Jeremy M. Weinstein which outlines "Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot." The text is divided into three sections: Decoding the Technologists, Disaggregating the Technologies, and Recoding the Future. The authors, three professors from Stanford, have kept the last section the shortest and most broad. But, as the Wall Street Journal review explains, "the book's contribution ... is to spell out what needs to be fixed" and there are numerous references to digital surveillance, biased algorithms, toxic content, and impact on democracy. Containing illustrative examples of unethical practices and misplaced values, SYSTEM ERROR offers extensive notes and a helpful index for researchers; it received a starred review from Publishers Weekly.

Three Stanford professors, experts in the field of the tech revolution present how big tech has ruined our values, wiped out our privacy, and made our society obsessed with algorithms. They also outline how we might fix it and take back our privacy and values. The authors include a philosopher working at the intersection of tech and ethics, a political scientist who served under Obama, and the director of the undergraduate Computer Science program at Stanford (also an early Google engineer) talk about working together to forge a new path forward into a future that doesn’t have to be dystopian.

This book took me a while. Don’t let that 8-bit cover fool you. There’s some deep stuff in here about the internet, our privacy, freedom of speech, etc. All the big questions when it comes to the digital age.

I learned some things but got a bit lost in the scope a few times, 100% a product of my headspace and not the authors. They did a great job of breaking down global, complex concepts for us everyday folks, and I appreciate that. I recommend the audiobook if you, like me, can’t tear through dense nonfiction books super quickly in print. I went back and forth between the two with this one, and that definitely helped me to absorb it more completely and enjoy it.

As usual, functional depression and a too-full schedule has me behind in reviews, so this one’s out wherever you consume books now.