Nick Clegg, then working as an govt at Meta, addresses a tech summit in Portugal in 2021
Hugo Amaral/SOPA Photos through ZUMA Press Wire/alamy
The right way to Save the Web
Nick Clegg (Bodley Head (UK, out now; US, 11 November))
I can pinpoint the second when my mind refused to soak up any extra of Nick Clegg’s new e book, The right way to Save the Web.
It was on web page 131, after a banal take a look at a future household whose lives had been improved by synthetic intelligence, adopted by a one-two punch of block-quoted chunks, first from a Massachusetts Institute of Know-how professor, then from an NPR article. I needed to put the e book down and stroll away. I couldn’t maintain out any longer. It was all too uninteresting.
However as a result of Clegg is a former govt at Fb-owner Meta who had a front-row seat throughout the agency’s clashes with regulators – and was additionally the UK’s deputy prime minister from 2010 to 2015 – I felt there needed to be one thing to be taught right here, so I picked it up once more.
In his time on the firm, Clegg witnessed a few of Meta’s most consequential choices throughout its platforms, such because the two-year ban positioned on US President Donald Trump in 2021. He presumably has ideas in regards to the impression of Meta’s insurance policies. Certainly, in The right way to Save the Web, he claims he’ll set out precisely what large tech has obtained unsuitable (and proper) and the way our on-line world could be pacified regardless of the rising affect of authoritarianism.
But the e book plods on with out a lot knowledge, filled with paragraph-length excerpts of different folks’s journalism, analysis and even weblog posts. When Clegg’s uncommon insights do seem, they’re at this degree of incisiveness: “if companies and different organisations can do extra in a working day, and rapidly and mechanically get insights from the information they maintain, this can assist them function extra effectively”. Thrilling, this isn’t.
Even the e book’s final chapter, by which Clegg outlines his grand plan to “save the web”, is crashingly apparent. “Probably the most harmful factor for the US to do is to hold on with enterprise as standard,” he writes in a world the place Chinese language AI mannequin DeepSeek wiped $1 trillion off US inventory markets in a day. Duh. A worldwide deal to lock out China is required, he says to a political readership that’s already doing precisely that.
Extra compelling to me would have been an in-depth clarification of how and why Meta intervened after Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol in 2021, resulting in the president’s ban. As a substitute, we be taught that CEO Mark Zuckerberg let Clegg make that decision, and he opted for the suspension. That’s it. Clegg was “acutely aware that it was a giant step for a personal firm, and one taken furthermore with out precedent and and not using a clear course of to observe”. Little of the method that was adopted is printed. It occurred, we’re instructed, however not proven.
Fairly why the e book leaves so temporary an imprint on the thoughts turns into clearer when you think about the writer. Clegg spent years as a politician, then a tech govt, two jobs by which the much less you’ll be able to share about your self with the general public, the higher. What higher signal of his success in these roles is there than writing a e book that poses limitless rhetorical questions resembling “What’s the possible socioeconomic impact of AI? Will it make inequality worse?” with out answering them?
The issue with The right way to Save the Web is that it tells you nothing. Each when it comes to positioning – ever the politician, there’s little that Clegg is keen to decide to firmly – and in recycling the identical drained tropes you’ve gotten learn elsewhere. The web’s roots are traced again to ARPANET and the army; AI isn’t truly clever; social media connects the planet, which is nice, but additionally unhealthy as a result of some connections contain insults.
That is an after-dinner speech printed en masse, a assume tank report in higher binding and a flowery jacket. Save the web? Save your self the hassle.
Chris Stokel-Walker is a tech author primarily based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
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