Ebook: How to Fix the Future

Introduction: we've been here before -- More's Law -- Five tools for fixing the future -- What is broken -- Utopia: a case study (book one) -- Utopia: a case study (book two) -- Regulation -- Competitive innovation -- Civic responsibility -- Labor and consumer power -- Education -- Conclusion.;"Humanity has in the past undergone periods of creative destruction where improvements of social and economic conditions have come with harmful side effects. But, as Keen points out, we have ways to fix the problems we are facing now. He identifies five key tools: competitive innovation, consumer choice, regulation, social responsibility, and education. Keen travels the world to see how experts, innovators, and entrepreneurs are using these tools to make positive change. Keen's journey takes him to Estonia, where an online portal has been developed to allow Estonians to see the data collected on them by the government, and Where an "e-residency" program is projected to bring 10 million e-citizens to the small Baltic state by 2025. Keen travels to Germany, where both regulation and competitive innovation are being used to address problems: Hamburg's data commissioner successfully blocked Facebook from collecting data on the country's users of WhatsApp, and developers of software such as Adblock Plus are helping ensure that advertising does not become the sole raison d'être for the Internet. In India, Keen speaks to a young entrepreneur who is building a new data ID system as part of the government's "Rebooting India" program--quite a task in a country of 1.3 billion people. And Keen of course travels to Silicon Valley, where he finds a growing understanding that the pioneering tech entrepreneurs who have harvested unimaginable wealth from their innovations must become better citizens and help solve some of the problems they have created in the same way a previous generation of philanthropists--the Mellons, Carnegies, and Rockefellers--did. Powerful, urgent, and deeply engaging, How to Fix the Future shows how we might preserve human values in an increasingly digital world and the steps we must take as societies and individuals to make the future something we can again look forward to."--Dust jacket.;A leading Internet commentator showcases global solutions for preserving the fundamentals of humanity and civilized society in an increasingly perilous digital world.