Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age

McCourt, executive chairman of the McCourt Global asset management firm, debuts with a run-of-the-mill plea to transform humanity’s relationship with technology. “The internet... is the primary cause of a pervasive unease in the United States,” McCourt contends, citing the usual misdeeds covered in countless Big Tech takedowns. He argues that cyberbullying lies behind a spike in suicides among people under 24 and that Facebook’s practice of garnering clicks by presenting users with content they’re likely to disagree with has driven political polarization. The solution, he asserts, lies in implementing a new internet protocol that would give users control over their personal data and allow them to withhold it from websites. The proposal is a somewhat novel spin on the Web3 vision of a decentralized internet, but it’s undercut by bombastic prose (at one point, McCourt urges readers to undertake the issue of data privacy “with the spirit of the American revolutionaries in 1776”). It’s also not clear that stricter control over personal data would be the panacea McCourt portrays it to be. For instance, it remains foggy how data privacy would lead to a “prosocial internet in which we are incentivized to develop useful connections and engage in healthy, collaborative interactions.” Readers drawn to the topic would be better off with Byron Tau’s Means of Control. (Mar.)