A Financial Times Book to Read in 2022
'One of the foremost thinkers on the transformative impact of the technology revolution'
Tony Blair
'Original and hopeful, The Digital Republic provides a unique guide to the great challenges of the digital age'
Anne Applebaum
'Lucid and persuasive'
Niall Ferguson
The Digital Republic is the definitive guide to the great political question of our time: how can freedom and democracy survive in a world of powerful digital technologies?
Not long ago, the tech industry was widely admired and the internet was regarded as a tonic for freedom and democracy. Not anymore. Every day, the headlines blaze with reports of racist algorithms, data leaks, and social media platforms festering with falsehood and hate. In The Digital Republic, acclaimed author Jamie Susskind argues that these problems are not the fault of a few bad apples at the top of the industry. They are the result of our failure to govern technology properly, a failure derived from decades of muddled ideas and wishful thinking.
The Digital Republic charts a new course, with new legal standards, new public bodies and institutions, new duties on platforms, new rights and regulators, and new codes of conduct for people in the tech industry. Inspired by the great political essays of the past, and steeped in the traditions of republican thought, it offers a vision of a different type of society: a digital republic in which human and technological flourishing go hand in hand.
About the Author
Jamie Susskind is a barrister and the author of the award-winning bestseller Future Politics- Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech, which received the Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book Prize 2019 and was an Evening Standard and Prospect Book of the Year. He has fellowships at Harvard and Cambridge and currently lives in London.
