“Suppose there was a machine that knew more than you … and could make better decisions than you. Would you hand control of all the important decisions in your life to that machine?” Paul Mason, in his tub-thumping humanist manifesto, takes this to be the urgent political question of our day. His ambitious narrative attempts to convince you that the answer should be a defiant no, but the results are confused.
Clear Bright Future belongs to a wave of recent books – those most similar to Mason’s are Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human and Shoshana Zuboff’s monumental The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – that reflect on the encroachment of technology into our lives. They point out that tech makers have designed platforms and devices that steal our attention, distract us from our higher goals and divide us into ideological echo chambers. Big-tech business models depend on surveilling us and converting our private experiences into data that they use to predict or manipulate our behaviour. This is what Mason calls the “nightmare of the present”.
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