Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy

by George Gilder

Overview

A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE MONTH

FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: "Nothing Mr. Gilder says or writes is ever delivered at anything less than the fullest philosophical decibel... Mr. Gilder sounds less like a tech guru than a poet, and his words tumble out in a romantic cascade."

“Google’s algorithms assume the world’s future is nothing more than the next moment in a random process. George Gilder shows how deep this assumption goes, what motivates people to make it, and why it’s wrong: the future depends on human action.” — Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies and author of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

The Age of Google, built on big data and machine intelligence, has been an awesome era. But it’s coming to an end. In Life after Google, George Gilder—the peerless visionary of technology and culture—explains why Silicon Valley is suffering a nervous breakdown and what to expect as the post-Google age dawns.

Google’s astonishing ability to “search and sort” attracts the entire world to its search engine and countless other goodies—videos, maps, email, calendars....And everything it offers is free, or so it seems. Instead of paying directly, users submit to advertising. The system of “aggregate and advertise” works—for a while—if you control an empire of data centers, but a market without prices strangles entrepreneurship and turns the Internet into a wasteland of ads.

The crisis is not just economic. Even as advances in artificial intelligence induce delusions of omnipotence and transcendence, Silicon Valley has pretty much given up on security. The Internet firewalls supposedly protecting all those passwords and personal information have proved hopelessly permeable.

The crisis cannot be solved within the current computer and network architecture. The future lies with the “cryptocosm”—the new architecture of the blockchain and its derivatives. Enabling cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether, NEO and Hashgraph, it will provide the Internet a secure global payments system, ending the aggregate-and-advertise Age of Google.

Silicon Valley, long dominated by a few giants, faces a “great unbundling,” which will disperse computer power and commerce and transform the economy and the Internet.

Life after Google is almost here.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781684512935
Publisher:	Skyhorse Publishing
Publication date:	01/04/2022
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	396,488
Product dimensions:	8.40(w) x 5.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

George Gilder, one of America's leading economic and technological thinkers, is the author of many groundbreaking books, including Wealth and Poverty, Knowledge and Power, The Scandal of Money, and Life after Google. A founding fellow of the Discovery Institute, where he began his study of information theory, and an influential venture capitalist, he lives with his wife on his family farm in western Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Back to the Future-The Ride xi

Chapter 1 Don't Steal This Book 1

Chapter 2 Google's System of the World 11

Chapter 3 Google's Roots and Religions 25

Chapter 4 End of the Free World 37

Chapter 5 Ten Laws of the Cryptocosm 45

Chapter 6 Google's Datacenter Coup 51

Chapter 7 Daily's Parallel Paradigm 63

Chapter 8 Markov and Midas 75

Chapter 9 Life 3.0 93

Chapter 10 1517 109

Chapter 11 The Heist 119

Chapter 12 Finding Satoshi 129

Chapter 13 Battle of the Blockchains 143

Chapter 14 Blockstack 159

Chapter 15 Taking Back the Net 171

Chapter 16 Brave Return of Brendan Eich 179

Chapter 17 Yuanfen 189

Chapter 18 The Rise of Sky Computing 199

Chapter 19 A Global Insurrection 213

Chapter 20 Neutering the Network 227

Chapter 21 The Empire Strikes Back 241

Chapter 22 The Bitcoin Flaw 247

Chapter 23 The Great Unbundling 257

Epilogue: The New System of the World 269

Some Terms of Art and Information for Life after Google 277

Bibliography 285

Notes 293

Index 313