Digital Is Destroying Everything: What the Tech Giants Won't Tell You about How Robots, Big Data, and Algorithms Are Radically Remaking Your Future Andrew V. Edwards

271 Pages·2015·1.73 MB·English

by  Edwards

Digital Is Destroying Everything
Digital Is Destroying Everything
What the Tech Giants Won’t Tell
You about How Robots, Big Data,
and Algorithms Are Radically
Remaking Your Future
Andrew V. Edwards
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
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Copyright © 2015 by Rowman & Littlefield
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
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without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Edwards, Andrew V., 1956–
Digital is destroying everything : what the tech giants won’t tell you about how
robots, big data, and algorithms are radically remaking your future / Andrew V.
Edwards.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-4422-4651-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-4652-2 (electronic)
1. Automation—Social aspects. 2. Technology—Social aspects. 3. Internet—Social
aspects. 4. Electronic data processing—Social aspects. I. Title.
T14.5.E385 2015
303.48'3—dc23
2014048145
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
This book is dedicated to my wife, Luchy,
and my children, Adam and Siena.
Foreword
There was a cold snap in the winter of 2000, and the New
York City sidewalks around Andrew’s office on John Street were
frozen solid and the front doors to his building were buried in
what seemed like several feet of snow.
The late 1990s was a time of digital agency rollups, and I
had moved to New York to lead a similar effort for a public
holding company whose assets included the venerable Harvard
Graphics, as well as Renaissance Multimedia, where Andrew
was CEO and founder.
I was the executive vice president of the company that just
acquired his, and my board had cautioned me to take it easy
with this shiny new acquisition and its quirky founder. I had
been in technology since the early 1980s and, having just
founded and built one of the first web analytic
companies (eventually sold to Yahoo), could relate to that
advice. Founders can be quirky and touchy. After all, it takes
one to know one.
Renaissance was hidden away several floors up a rickety
elevator, in a building not far from Wall Street and a block away
from the Italianate Federal Reserve. The location was
archetypically New York. I met Andrew for the first time in a cold
lobby on John Street that winter’s day.
Andrew is a New Yorker’s New Yorker and has a “don’t mess
with me” presence at six-foot-four, with black horn-rimmed
glasses and a Long Island accent you could cut with a knife. For
our first meeting, we crossed the street for lunch to one of those
hidden places, down a flight of stairs, and beyond the heavy
velvet curtain to a dimly lit restaurant ringed with big guys
dressed in tuxedos. This was a place only a New Yorker would
know.
We went to a booth behind another curtain, sat down, and
ordered a pair of dirty martinis and huge steaks. The waiter
closed the curtain. It was like something that Martin Scorsese
could have directed.
could have directed.
There I was, seated with this looming guy, having a drink
around noon in a part of the city that rarely sees the sun, and
wondering where the conversation might go. I remember my
caution as I downed a couple of drinks. And I learned that day
that Andrew is a Renaissance man somewhat on the order of a
digital Kerouac or Dalí—that he paints and writes. His paintings
are stunning and sarcastic. Overall, he was quite the opposite of
the digital guy I thought I’d gone to meet.
That was the first chapter.
Andrew believes that life begins where one’s comfort zone
ends, and he understands that technology breeds disruption. I
know that because we’ve worked together at almost a dozen
transformative digital companies—like Webtrends,
WebSideStory/Adobe, Unica/IBM—and together we co-founded
the Digital Analytics Association. We have guided some of the
world’s largest brands and youngest, most innovative firms.
We’ve taken risks on new emerging market sectors and have
made some hard calls about picking winners and losers. Mostly
we get it right.
He has illuminated this story with a special light of reflection
from decades of pioneering digital work, tempered and filtered
through the prism of a painter’s vision and a writer’s prose. He
is able to capture and question the duality of the age. Is digital
destroying everything? Or, he suggests, “Maybe it’s all bullshit.”
With his curious mind, Andrew is at his best when he has a
powerful narrative to command.
His book is lyric almost as much as it is a narrative on our
digital condition, and the stories and his perceptions are filled
with wit and humor fueled by his personal experience.
We have helped shape the digital age. We have helped
shape the digital divide. I think the best pages are those where
he repeatedly questions the assertion about how wonderful the
digital age really is. So, then, is digital destroying everything?
The ending has yet to be written.

Andrew shines a bright light on those dark places so that
you might decide for yourself.
January 2015
Rand Schulman
Executive-in-Residence for Digital Media and Marketing
University of the Pacific
San Francisco, California
A Note on the Use of the Word
“Digital” in This Book
The word “digital,” in the context typically assigned to it in
the current era, has been used more or less as an adjective
(“digital marketing,” “digital domain,” “digital expertise”) as a
stand-in for descriptives like “computerized” and “information-
technology-related.”
I’ve decided to turn the adjective into a noun. Thus, in this
book, “digital” conveys a meaning similar to “all disciplines,
practices, and products relating to the information-technology
industries.” Using it thus makes for an encompassing locution
that provides clarity and simplicity at once, and also makes for a
briefer and more incisive volume.
Chapter 1
Digital Is Destroying Everything
Digital—the combined power of Internet Protocol–enabled
devices, the World Wide Web, cloud computing, cheap storage,
algorithms, “social media,” massive data collection by
marketers and governments, mobile apps and wireless
connectivity—is destroying everything. And yet a new and
rather eye-catching garden is sprouting on the blasted heath,
often with a suddenness that appalls the unprepared. Much of
the culture we’ve known until recently is already destroyed, and
some of what’s been toppled has seen us refreshed and
reinvigorated by digital, but some has not. And some things we
thought would be forever, things we’ve admired and held dear,
are soon, before the march of all things digital, likely to be no
more.
When I began working “in computers,” I regarded the
information-technology industry a most amenable way to make
a career for myself—indeed, it allowed me to “go out on my
own,” which was fortunate, as I had demonstrated but little skill
at working for others. Digital was absorbing, and there was a
scent of revolution in the air. It was scrappy, and nobody,
including some very large organizations that ought to have
known better, thought it would amount to anything, and for
several years it seemed as if it might not. I devoted many years
to proving the doubters wrong.
Now digital has gotten spooky. We used to hope for the
wonders we have today, but we always had thought it would
also involve an egalitarian multiverse of independent voices and
views; that it would do more to level the field than foment
volcanic ranges that smoke out the sun. We had scarcely
imagined that governments might even be interested, never
mind mastering it the more to master us.
This book will examine specific industries and familiar ways
of life that have been, or are soon to be, altered, in ways that
few have been able to predict, and fewer still able to
contextualize or fully comprehend.