The Blind GiantThis post is supposed to be a review of a new book out by Nick Harkaway called The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World. Not one to bury my lead, I think it’s a great book and you should all go buy it right now.

So with that out of the way I’d like to share some context, that as an outsider, I find interesting about Nick, about the “place” from which this book was written and finally a little bit about the book itself. In full disclosure I should say that I’m not an unbiased reviewer. I like Nick. Nick invited my wife and me to the Angelmaker launch party and he has given me advance copies of both Angelmaker and The Blind Giant.

Regardless of my personal affinity towards Nick, The Blind Giant is interesting for me on many levels.

I found it especially interesting reading this book because it came right on the heels of Nick’s second novel, Angelmaker. Nick is an amazing writer. He has a way of using words and building sentences that will leave you re-reading sentences not for clarity but just for the sheer enjoyment of reading a well-written sentence. It’s obvious that Nick loves to write, and that comes through in his writing.

The Blind Giant doesn’t contain nearly the level of word play that Nick’s novels do but I can honestly say that it was refreshing to read a non-fiction book written by a novelist, not a business blogger turning out a book. This is not a knock against my business-blogger-turned-author friends, because many of them have written excellent books (something I haven’t done), but not many of us can command the English language the way Nick does.

Most interesting to me though, is that this is a book about the disruption of technology, by a writer who is the child of writers (Nick’s father is John le Carré). Nick has grown up in one of the industries most disrupted by technology, and being a member of Generation X, Nick grew up during the time that technology itself has grown up.

Nick is prolific in his use of social media and, that’s how I came to know Nick. Several years ago I stumbled across his book, The Gone-Away World, and quickly discovered that Nick has a blog and is active on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. Not only does he have and use these accounts but he genuinely engages with his followers; which was not at all what I expected. My experience is that most authors only really talk with other authors unless they have a book to promote, then they’re suddenly very engaging.

But while Nick may be an early adopter and a power user of social media he also made a name for himself here in the UK as an outspoken critic of the heavy-handed approach tech companies take with their users. He has been most vocal on the Google Book Settlement. Nick took issue not with the existence of the project, but with the way in which Google went about it. It’s this outspokenness about tech that led Nick to write The Blind Giant.

What becomes apparent about Nick – and is evident in The Blind Giant - is that he is passionate about the potential of technology, and understands that it can be used for “good” just as well as “evil.” Because of his background and his current situation Nick sits balanced between the ongoing debates surrounding technology, intellectual property, publishing and privacy (I should also mention his wife is a human rights lawyer).

Nick starts the book by doing an admirable job of covering the huge topic of modern technology, specifically computing and the Internet, taking us from the early days (aka the 80s) through to modern times. For those of us that lived during this time it’s a nice bit of nostalgia. For those who weren’t paying attention and wondered where all of this tech stuff suddenly came from, it’s a good crash-course. It’s also a useful piece of history for the younger Generation Y readers who don’t know what Netscape was (seriously, Mark Zuckerberg didn’t know what Netscape was and had to ask Facebook board member and Netscape co-founder, Marc Andreessen).

Nick then tackles, head on, many of today’s hotly debated topics. I was delighted that he took to task several of the complaints Nicholas Carr raised in his book The Shallows (aka “Google is making us Stupid”). And he discusses the debate on publishing and intellectual property and how many forces are putting it at odds with personal privacy – you shouldn’t have to give up one for the other.

The book is not long (especially compared to Nick’s novels) and at just over 250 pages Nick doesn’t have a lot of time to go deep on each topic. But what he does well is frame each topic with enough context and examples and then breaks the subject open enough for the reader to continue the debate intelligently. In fact, there is an accompanying website at www.blindgiant.co.uk where readers are encouraged to continue the debate in a forum or in posts about each chapter.

There are very few definitive conclusions made in the book and I believe this is because Nick wants to the reader to come to their own conclusions. Nick’s main point is that we created technology and (in my words, not his) that it is in fact a natural extension of our own evolutionary progress. We created technology to solve some of our more pressing problems (and to have some fun). We created technology to allow us to be more human, not less. But it won’t just sit there and regulate itself (or us) and manage how we use it. If we don’t manage ourselves and technology then at best it becomes yet another distraction, a point of stress in our lives. At worst, larger forces, like governments and corporations will turn technology into a tool to manipulate us.

Ultimately Nick argues that we need to develop our critical analysis skills. He even offers up a few tips and tools to help us along. To survive and thrive in the digital age we need to ask ourselves and each other hard questions, we need to engage in debates. We can’t sit by with optimistic expectations of the inevitable arrival of a technology utopia or with fatalistic expectations that an apocalyptic technology dystopia is inevitable.

To borrow a line from The Blind Giant:

The hard truth is: get involved, or get sidelined. The future is not set. It’s being made right now.