Wow, the year only has 8 days left 😱! Time for a review, with some useless stats and links to things I worked on.

Like last year, I’ve divided this into highlights and things I learned.

Highlights

Projects

In the first half year of 2019, I continued my project at Mozilla’s Open Innovation team, building their People directory, and worked in the City of The Hague on accessibility and the internal design system.

In July I started a new project: at the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), I am now working as part of the European Commission-funded WAI-Guide project. My work there is focused on improving the accessibility of/in tools that create web content, like CMSes. In short: we want more accessibility both for content editors (a good editing experience) and for end users (good output).

Apart from my work at the W3C, I’ve been doing the occasional WCAG audit and accessibility/CSS workshop in my own capacity too.

Speaking

Last year I spoke at my first conference. This year I got the opportunity to do new (and some older) talks in various places, of which some were as part of my project at the W3C/WAI.

In March, I did a talk called It’s the markup that matters at De Voorhoede. It was part of their Future Proof Components event, and covered building accessible components, accessibility trees and the AOM.

At WordCamp Rotterdam and Inclusive Design Ghent, I shared 6 ways to make your site more accessible, based on my experience looking at common accessibility problems that front-end developers can do something about.

In October, I presented a very short lightning talk at the Web We Want session at View Source Conference, about how some accessibility problems could cease to exist if browsers would automatically fix them. The problems: zoomability, readability, color contrast and focus indication (the first three are each solved in at least one browser, the fourth has not). This talk, shockingly, won both the jury and audience award.

Also in October was a talk called Breaking barriers with your CMS at the Fronteers Jam Session (on behalf of W3C/WAI). This presented some of my recent work at WAI: it explained ATAG and the role of the CMS in accessibility efforts.

At the Design in Government Conference in November, I talked about the case for web accessibility from philosophical ethics, again on behalf of W3C/WAI, and I did an updated version of my graphic design on the web talk in Dutch for Freshheads in Tilburg.

Then in December, I joined dotCSS to talk about the history of CSS: On the origin of cascades put some of that in a Darwin-themed talk. The venue was enormous and intimidating, and there was transport strikes, but the event itself was excellent, with a great atmosphere and very well organised.

I also did a number of in-house talks and workshops, about CSS Layout, ARIA and accessibility guidelines.

Reading

I read much more than last year (72 books so far), and have written more about books on this blog (see reading list about equality and reading list about tech and society). Reading more books helped me read less social media, watch less video and generally relax more. Please become my friend on Goodreads (it’s not great, but if more people join we can all share recommendations)!

Some notes:

• Audiobooks are great as you can read them in situations where holding a book doesn’t work (e.g. walking a dog, housework)
• To read more, finding the right books is half of the work (I mean, not literally… but it is important). I found more people to follow on Goodreads, keep a close eye on the literary supplements in the papers and love posts like 2018: books in review by Karolina Szczur.
• Dutch libraries have ebooks and audiobooks that can be ‘borrowed’ via apps.

Writing

This year I wrote 24 posts (including this one), which means I have now over 100 posts in total on this blog.

Some posts that people found interesting:

• On the importance of testing with content blockers
• Component frameworks and web standards on my first experience using a front-end framework
• Naming things to improve accessibility on the importance of accessible names in things like buttons, links and tables
• Baking accessibility into components: how frameworks help: frameworks can get a bad name in the accessibility world, but I increasingly think when used by accessibility-aware developers, they can make things better, not worse
• Meaning without markup: Accessibility Object Model: a primer on the Accessibility Object Model, a technology that is still under development and potentially interesting for a variety of reasons

I also contributed to the Mozilla Hacks blog, writing Indicating focus to improve accessibility and How accessibility trees inform assistive tech. Thanks to Havi Hoffman for the opportunity!

Cities

This year I traveled to Antwerp, Berlin, Bristol, Essen, Ghent, Nice, Paris, Taipei and Vienna, using trains where possible, but I need to do better at that.

Things I learned

Here’s some random things that I learned about in the past year:

• Recently I started working on an app with Svelte, the front-end framework that doesn’t ship in its entirety to the user’s runtime, but tries to compile as much as possible to vanilla JavaScript. Small bundles, yay!
• As I started my project at the W3C, I learned a lot the standards process, the dynamics in Working Groups and the bots that help run teleconferences.
• A large part of my work centered around authoring tools, or tools that create web content, and how they can help bring more accessibility in the world.
• I became increasingly aware of the role of surveillance capitalism in the world.
• I learned to love AirTable as a way to organise and plan the non-coding parts of my work, which are becoming a larger part of the whole

In any case, I’d like to thank the readers of this blog for reading and sharing the posts I’ve published, it means the world to me.

I wish you all a great 2020!

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Originally posted as 2019 in review on Hidde's blog.

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Within the bubble of technologists, the future looks bright and exciting. Outside of it, worried scholars and publicists have written a lot of books about the dangers of Big Tech, surveillance and the power of the market. This is a list of some interesting reads to better understand the impact of technology on society.

This may sound depressing, and it is, to some extent. The world is doomed and it is technologists’ fault! But when we understand better how technology, the tech sector and “computational thinking” fit in the context of society, it will get easier to decide whether we should push back.

As always, this reading list is what I happened to read on the subject, there are lots of other interesting publications out there.

How power dynamics changed

I already wrote about The Age of Surveillance Capitalism before, but I wanted to re-include it here. This book really ought to be the first item on a list of books about how tech impacts society. It defines “surveillance capitalism” and shows its workings in great detail. As I said in my review, it is not a quick read, but absolutely recommended for anyone who works in tech. We’ve got to understand this if we want to make things right.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

A critique of “disruptive” technologies

In his fantastic Radical Technologies, “to be played at maximum volume” as the last page says, Adam Greenfield explains and critically evaluates a wide range technologies that are supposedly the future, including internet of things, augmented reality, blockchain, 3D printing and machine learning. His angle is not “wow, exciting!”, but ”what is this, is it really as good as promised, and how will large-scale deployment impact society?”. I wish we would all adapt the same mindset when assessing new tech, because there are many reasons to oppose these “radical” technologies. Blockchain doesn’t scale, internet of things devices have major security and privacy implications and machine learning is, despite many practical applications, often not fully misunderstood (as people tend to forgot that data is not neutral, not objective and always a subset of reality). The book ends with a number of future scenarios, ranging from utopias to dystopias, which help ask the question: “what do we want a tech-driven society to look like?”

Radical Technologies by Adam Greenfield

Has Big Tech lost its soul?

Many of Silicon Valley’s big companies once started with idealistic mantras and values, like ‘Don’t be evil’ and ‘Information wants to be free’, but the tide has turned. The book shows how (excerpt from the cover):

a world where “information wants to be free” became one in which we are the product being monetized, how the geeks tinkering with motherboards in their basements grew to be arrogant billionaires monopolizing the lion‘s share of the economy, and how the “democratized” internet we were promised can threaten the very fabric of our democracy.

Foroohar brilliantly explains where it went wrong. Tech companies made their products extremely addictive with the help of behaviorist psychology. Secondly, they have become monopolies in ways we haven’t seen before by both creating the market and operating in it. Thirdly, they got heavily involved in government with far-reaching lobbying for tax cuts and deregulation and by lending their targeted advertising platforms (as well as their consultants (!) for advice) to political campaigns. All of this is enabled and strengthened by surveillance capitalism.

Foroohar backs up her arguments with extensive research, and provides solutions, too. Is it depressing? Well, slightly, but it certainly left me with the feeling that having the picture painted so clearly will help address it.

Don’t Be Evil - The Case Against Big Tech by Rana Foroohar

What government surveillance looks like

The extent of Big Tech’s collection of personal data may be extraordinary, but the government’s mass surveillance programs are as disturbing, as Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations have shown in great detail. In Permanent Record, Snowden tells two histories: that of his own growing up and that of how the intelligence community (IC) got more and more powerful after 9/11. I found the personal stories interesting, the analysis thorough and the details thought-provoking. He makes useful semantic distinctions; for instance, he explains how metadata is more intimate than content data, because we create it unknowingly, rather than thoughtfully. The book is full of wordplay… a “permanent record” is what this book is of Snowden’s life, but also what the intelligence communmity keeps of every citizen. “Hacking” is what Snowden used to do as a kid to minimise time spent on homework, but also what would become part of his work and revelations.

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

The impact of tech company culture on society

Super Pumped is New York Times journalist Mike Isaac’s book about Uber. It gives detailed accounts of the company’s founder, culture and attitude. Three things that are are, it turns out, closely interrelated. The book’s odd name is literally one of Uber’s corporate “values”, and yes, I too was surprised to read that this company has those (given the plethora of scandals on so many different aspects of human dignity). There are the accounts of bad things that happened, but then there’s also how the company tried to cover those bad things by hiring prominent PR firms. I understand… every organisation above a certain size will have people who work to maintain and defend the company’s public image. Sure. But this book shows it clearly Uber doesn’t care, the company carries out an agenda that benefits few and hurts many, and has its bro-y culture leak into society in many bad ways. This has definitely put Uber on the top of my list of companies I would never want to work for.

Super Pumped by Mike Isaac

Political activism through technology

When an anthropologist studies a hacker slash activist movement, it might just yield a super interesting book about online culture. Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy by Gabriella Coleman is a investigative study of Anonymous, with a look into what they do, want and think, completed with IRC logs, which I think were a great way to provide a look into online culture. Sometimes she talks a little too much about herself, but I feel it kind of works in this context. This book gives some interesting insights into Anonymous, the “lulz” and the motivations between some of the group’s core members.

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous by Gabriella Coleman

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Originally posted as Tech vs society: a reading list on Hidde's blog.

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A couple of weeks ago, I joined the Fronteers Jam Session to talk about something that I’ve been working on in the last couple of months: the ways in which CMSes can bring accessibility benefits. This is a written version of that talk.

Note that these are just some examples of things that CMSes can do… truth is, I only had ten minutes. But still, I’m hoping more people will think of CMSes as accessibility accelerators, as there is lots of potential!

From one block of content to lots of content blocks

As an industry, we have gotten a lot better at designing content on the web since the early days. Away are the times of boring looking documents with little white space and ineffective typography.

We have gotten better at web design since this.

Part of why we got better, is that modern CSS has gotten some exciting new features in recent years. We now have things like variable fonts, HSL colours, blend modes and floats that are not rectangular. And of course, there’s this now widely supported new lay-out mode: Grid Layout. It lets us be intentional about white space. We can lay content out in ways that we truly did not have before.

Something else that has changed is how we thing about what we are designing. Thanks to the work of people like Alla Kholmatova (Design Systems) and Brad Frost (Atomic Design), we have, as an industry, started to think about our work in terms of components or patterns… distinct pieces of functionality, rather than full, all-encompassing pages.

This leaves us with a new content management challenge. Previously, these long documents could be edited with one big block of WYSIWYG-text. Components require something different, you would probably create fields for every bit of data they contain.

A teaser component might have fields for a title, sub title, call to action text and link destination, for instance. For front-end developers, that might mean you can have all this data as strings, and wrap it in whatever HTML makes most sense. This isn’t necessarily new or recent, many CMSes have had this option for years, and it is has become the standard in headless systems. But still, many large organisations don’t.

Example component-specific edit screen

There is also a different content management trend that addresses our new component-based world: visual editors. Or, as they’re sometimes referred to: “no code editors”. This might sound worrying to all front-end developers, because when you wrap markup around data, you can do all sorts of good for performance, code quality and accessibility. Having a system deal with all of that automatically is… scary? And what about accessibility specifically, what if this harms actual users?

I could turn this question around… what if CMSes benefit actual users, by having accessibility built in?

The accessibility standard for CMSes

Accessibility standards consider CMSes as part of a larger group, that also includes other tools, like Learning Management Systems (LMS), wikis, social media, WYSWIYG editors, ”Save as HTML” functionality… basically everything that creates web content or facilitates the creation of HTML. These tools that create web content are also known as authoring tools. They can potentially improve a lot of accessibility at once.

Among a number of standards and specifications, the W3C has published three standards for web accessibility (“Accessibility Guidelines”):

• WCAG is for web content, adopted by governments worldwide
• UAAG is for browsers (“user agents”)
• ATAG is for authoring tools, like CMSes

So yes, there is a standard specifically about the accessibility of authoring tools, including CMSes and other things that produce HTML (see also: ATAG: the standard for accessibility of content creation).

There are two things that ATAG requires from CMSes: they should be accessible themselves (i.e. work for people with disabilities), and they should encourage accessibility (i.e. produce and assist content editors with producing accessible output).

The editing experience

Creating an accessible editing experience means that people with disabilities have no barriers to create content: they can use the buttons, understand relevant context and access the interface with the input method that works for them.

To give some examples, and yes, these also exist on websites that are not CMSes:

Accessible names

A common accessibilitity issue is that the buttons in the interface are visually just icons. To make those work for users of assistive technologies, it is important that they have proper labels or accessible names. More about this in Naming things to improve accessibility

Keyboard accessibility

Something else that is common in CMSes is that they require a mouse to be fully used. By ensuring keyboard accessibility, you can make the interface work for various groups of people. This includes indicating what has focus. See also: Indicating focus to improve accessibility

Zooming

Some users will be using the CMS interface with their screen set to zoom in considerably, say 200 to 300 percent. This works well in the type of text documents I discussed at the start. On the web, text just reflows. It becomes more tricky in complex CMS interfaces, because there could be floating and sticky things that overlap with content when zoomed too much. See: Test content scaling

An interesting overview of what accessibility issues could look like in a real CMS is the crowdsourced accessibility audit that was done for WordPress’ new Gutenberg editor. As someone who is interested in the accessibility of content management systems, I am grateful that this was released publicly, this way everyone can learn.

The output

Apart from breaking barriers in the editing experience, we can also break barriers for users of the actual website. If we improve how HTML is produced by a CMS, we can potentially make a difference for all pages and sites produced by it.

Alt attributes

Most front-end developers will be aware images require alternative text in their alt attribute (or a conscious decision to leave it blank). Yet lots of websites lack it on some of their images. I don’t think this is because people aren’t aware of what the alt attribute is for. This could simply be a responsibility issue: the developer only built the template, the content editor only used the template, etc… Somewhere in between the attribute did not get shipped to the user.

The CMS could be smart about this. It could:

• throw an error for missing alt attributes when an editor saves a page
• provide information on what makes a good alt text
• come with a checkbox that says “This needs no alternative, it is a decoration or already covered in other text”
• throw an error if someone tries to link an image that has no alt (because alt attributes can become link texts)

Spelling

If you’ve accidentally used “Swbmit” as a button text, that might not impact visual users so much, as they will probably see from the visual context what the word should be. For someone using a tool like Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which lets users tell their computer which buttons to click, the mismatch could be more problematic. For someone who uses a screenreader, it could also be annoying to have misspelled content, because if it is misspelled, it will get mispronounced , too.

What if the CMS had a built-in spelling checker? That way, we could identify issues before they exist, and fix them before they get shipped to the user.

Colour contrast

When your site uses that design pattern where there is a text layed over a photo, it matters a lot what the photo is. Is it a dark-ish photo with light text on it, or are text and photo both light? The latter could lead to super low contrast, and with that, barriers for all sorts of users. This can affect people with various kinds of visual impairments, but also people who are outside in the sun, or those who have turned Brightness on their phone down to safe battery life.

Colour contrast issues can be programmatically detected, so why not do it right in the CMS? After uploading a new header image, the CMS could do a quick contrast check and display an error if the page no longer meets the criteria. Again, we could identify issues before they exist, and fix before shipping.

Whether it be with automated checks, carefully crafted content editing screens, extensive documentation of accessibility features… if we manage to bring some of our accessibility fixing to the CMS, we may be able to prevent barriers from shipping to users.

Conclusion

As front-end developers, we are all involved in the creation of web content. With this post, I hope to have given some examples of how CMSes can help create more accessible web content. Of course, it is just a couple of examples… but I think there are CMS-based solutions like this for a lot of different accessibility problems that we see on the web today. To be continued!

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Originally posted as Breaking barriers with your CMS on Hidde's blog.

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This week I read (the print-version of) the Internet Health Report 2019, published by the Mozilla Foundation about issues that potentially stand in the way of a web that ‘puts people first’. With the phrase ‘putting people first’, the report means ensuring aspects like safety, openness, inclusion and control. Some of these things improved in the past years, some less so than one would have hoped.

I read it by the waterside on my holiday

The Internet Health Report is edited by Solana Larsen for Mozilla Foundation and puts together input from hundreds of readers and experts in an extremely readable format. Or multiple formats, really, as there is the website, the ebook and (new this year) a printed edition. The print version definitely helped me read the full thing. Everyone is invited to participate:

this publication is neither a country-level index nor a doomsday clock. We invite you to join us in assessing what it means for the internet to be healthy, and to participate in setting an agenda for how we can work together to create an internet that truly puts people first

(From the README)

In his update, Mozilla Foundation’s Mark Surman calls out three things that improved: calls for privacy are becoming more mainstream, people start to speak up about and work on more responsible AI and a healthy discussion about big tech is taking place among more and more people. Some things also got worse, Surman writes: there is more internet censorship, biometrics are being abused and increased AI usage specifically affects minorities because of bias, despite efforts like ethics boards.

This post has some of the things that piqued my interest, with links. For the full content, including all sources and links, get the printed edition or visit the Mozilla Internet Health Report 2019 website, where you can read everything or just the things you’re interested in. There is also a PDF of the short version.

Data: this year’s spotlight

In the spotlight section, the Internet Health Report features three articles that all have something to do with data.

AI

‘Use of AI is skyrocketing (for fun, as well as for governance, military and business) and not nearly enough attention is paid to the associated risks’, says the report. Governments start to use AI in military, for immigration decisions and for surveilling citizens, places one can imagine (racial) bias can cause serious harm. OpenAI decided not to release a trained data set as they worried about malicious uses of the technology. Some companies founded ethics boards to govern their AI usage, but they are often big companies with, inevitably, competing priorities. See also: Let’s ask more of AI

Cities

Data is useful for cities to base their policies on, and are somewhat envious of the ‘data monopoly’ big tech companies like Uber and AirBnB have. Some only give permission to do business on the condition of getting access to businesses’ data. See also: The power of cities

Ads

Paying for products with your personal data threatens freedom and human rights, because the algorithms that let companies do targeted advertising, can also be exploited by people with bad intentions. Some change is happening: Facebook, Twitter and Google all took some action against abuse after public pressure and new legislations. Lots of browsers now protect against tracking and/or block ads. Companies also start to realise targeting and knowing everything about everyone doesn’t necessarily make them more effective. See also: Rethinking digital ads

Safety

More and more awareness around privacy on the web is raised; by the campaigns of non profits like the EFF and Mozilla, but also by numerous data leaks that got into mainstream news and GDPR, the European data protection legislation that affects pretty much all businesses that are online. Tracking protection has become something browsers compete on (Firefox and Safari are ahead in this game), and even Facebook’s CEO announced that they now care about privacy.

• While anonymity online can be abused by criminals, it is also absolutely worth defending and an important tool for whistleblowers reporting on corruption, or for people whose government oppresses them. See also: In defense of anonymity
• If you don’t want big tech to have your data, you just don’t give it, right? Well, Katarzyna Szymielewicz has a useful metaphor of three layers of data: the first is data you share and control, the second is behavioral data and metadata that others collect (if you want to control this, you need expertise) and the third is what machines think about you (we have no control, because they are the result of companies combining data with algorithms we often can’t see). See also: Show me my data and I’ll tell you who I am

Openness

The web has always been fundamentally open. Imagine starting a new website required a government issued permit, or that getting onto any website required a certain kind of education, nationality or payment… Worldwide, this openness is threatened, as there exist walled gardens, social media taxes and shutdowns.

• Governments who want to frustrate their citizens’ communications used to turn off the whole internet, but this was relatively easy to detect (for instance, by organisations protecting human rights), so they try out other tactics, like shutting down the internet in just one region or slow it down instead of turning it off. See also: Internet slowdowns are the new shutdowns
• Various African countries now have taxes on using social media and messaging apps (Uganda), VOIP (Zambia) and even blogging and vlogging (Tanzania). See also: Taxing social media in Africa
• Germany implemented a law against online hate speech and harrassment, which can force social media companies to take down certain content. Some call for web companies to be open about who reported content and how complaints are handled. See also: Inside Germany’s crackdown on hate speech
• Wikidata, a project by the non-profit behind Wikipedia, offers lots of volunteer-created structured data. Technology firms who make voice assistants get a lot of value from this. Despite that, vast majority of donations is still from individuals, and only 4% from corporations. See also: Wikidata gives wings to open knowledge

Inclusion

Is the internet a level playing field yet for people from all backgrounds? This question has multiple sides to it: it is about how online communities fight harrassment and abuse, and about the working conditions of people who make internet hardware.

• Women and women of colour in journalism are (still) much more likely to be harrassed online than men, various study showed. See more: Women journalists feel the brunt of online harassment
• Contributors to open source projects that power a lot of the world are often a homegeneous group. That’s bad as code is not neutral and i.e. biased towards the people who write it. Strictly enforced code of conducts are appreciated by underrepresented groups, have helped community members call out bad behaviour and are therefore a helpful instrument in trying to make open source communities more diverse. See also: Codes of Conduct now guide open source communities

Web literacy

Do people understand the web well enough to make informed choices about things like sharing baby photos and recognising fake news? Do we understand it well enough to use it to people’s benefit, for example as a platform for activists to collaborate on?

• 3101 people from 124 countries worked together analysing footage, interviews and expert analysis in a project called Decoded, to show that the US-led coalition’s bombing of the Syrian city of Raqqa costed not 23 civilian deaths, but over 1500. See also: Decoding images of war in Syria
• User tracking and targeting employed for manipulation of public opinion with fake news threatens democracy. Cambridge Analytica was not only involved with influencing the British and US electorates, but also worked in many other countries, including Kenya, Brazil and Mexico. For this year’s European Election, Google, Twitter, Facebook and Mozilla pledged to do somethimg about this, signing the European Commission’s Code of Practice on Disinformation. See also: The challenge of democracy in the digital era
• Are we addicted to the internet? Research that showed Americans spend 6 hours a day on their devices and (other research) showing maintaining a user’s attention as a design principle seem to suggest so. That’s probably not time well spent. In the meantime Apple and Facebook introduced features to limit screen time. See also: Breaking free of the addiction machine

Control

Should the web be controlled by few or many? In other words, should power lie with a couple of companies that everything centers around, or do we want the web to be more decentralised? The Internet Health Report 2019 contains lots of good arguments for decentralisation.

• There’s the question of ‘who (literally) controls the internet’. The cables deep under the sea that make the web work used to be built by telecom cariers in the early 90s, but are now invested in by private companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (who, in 2018, owned or leased over 50% of these cables between them). See also: The new investors in underwater sea cables
• For Uber, and many ‘unicorn’ companies like it, the structure of ‘everything (taxi rides, etc) goes through our company’, ie centralisation, is what gets their investors’ hope for returns up. Fine, that’s capitalism. But the model gets in the way of others providing alternatives or putting users in control. This is an issue when such companies have become utilities, says Nathan Schneider. These companies would probaby do things very differently if their users owned them, in which case they would only have to consider user interests. See also: What if Facebook were owned by its users?
• The largest five internet companies make money by selling user’s attention to advertisers (Google, Facebook and Baidu), selling devices (Microsoft and Apple), being a middle man (Amazon and Alibaba) and doing lots of things from payments to in-app purchases to ads (WeChat parent company Tencent). See also: How do the biggest internet companies make money?
• Nextcloud is an effort to create an open source cloud, but unlike with traditional open source software it is not cheaper (free) compared to alternatives, it costs more (because you need to pay for hosting somewhere). See also: An open source alternative for “the cloud”

I learned a lot from reading the Internet Health Report 2019, from great new initiatives to serious problems that I wasn’t aware of. As a reader of this blog, I invite you to dive in yourself, too!

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Originally posted as Notes from the Internet Health Report 2019 on Hidde's blog.

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Zed by Joanna Kavenna is a dystopian satire, set in a future Great Britain, where a tech giant called Beetle runs most of society. Their ‘lifechain’ product is able to predict the future, which the justice department uses to prosecute people for future crimes (very Minority Report). They also deal in currency (BeetleBits), transport (Mercury cars), virtual assistents (Veeps) and VR (Real Virtuality).

Beetle’s CEO, Guy Matthias, is one of those tech CEOs that Sillicon Valley seems to have way too many of. Before he addresses a conference in Davos, he orders his robot to read Thomas Mann’s Magic mountain, and distill a funny opening from it. When he needs a date for a dinner party, he checks out the expected success rate.

Beetle takes pride in that they’ve created a reality where everything can be predicted and determined by smart algorithms… except it can’t, it sometimes fails. Of course it does. Those who insist we should compute every aspect of our lives clearly fail to truly understand every aspect of our lives.

Zed is an excellent novel about what could go wrong if big technology corporations have too much power and not enough humanities majors in their leadership. It is very resemblant of the real world: Facebook who want to introduce a currency, Uber who try to reinvent transport… the list goes on.

Someone on Goodreads called it ‘the fictional extension of Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism’, which I think is apt. I would warmly recommend this to people who are interested in a critical look at the tech industry. See also the review in The Observer.

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Originally posted as Book review: Zed on Hidde's blog.

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