The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath

In The End of Big, Internet pioneer and Harvard Kennedy School lecturer Nicco Mele draws on nearly twenty years of experience to explore the consequences of revolutionary technology.

Our ability to connect instantly, constantly, and globally is altering the exercise of power with dramatic speed. Governments, corporations, centers of knowledge, and expertise are eroding before the power of the individual. It can be good in some cases, but as Mele reveals, the promise of the Internet comes with a troubling downside. He asks:

• How does radical thinking underpin the design of everyday technology—and undermine power?
• How do we trust information when journalists are replaced by bloggers, phone videos, and tweets?
• Two-party government: will its collapse bring us qualified leaders, or demagogues and special-interest-backed politicians?
• Web-based micro-businesses can out-compete major corporations, but who enforces basic regulations—product safety, privacy protection, fraud, and tax collection?
• Currency, health and safety systems, rule of law: when these erode, are we better off?

Unless we exercise deliberate moral choice over the design and use of technologies, Mele says, we doom ourselves to a future that tramples human values, renders social structures chaotic, and destroys rather than enhances freedom. Both hopeful and alarming, thought-provoking and passionately-argued, The End of Big is an important book about our present—and our future.