THE BOOK AMAZON REFUSED TO MARKET!

Okay, enough with the histrionics. Although, histrionics or not, it’s true. For almost a year, Amazon refused to let me run a marketing campaign for my novel, Brightstar, because they deemed it too controversial. Why? Apparently, because Russia is the ‘bad guy’ in the novel. That’s not true: Putin is the bad guy in the novel, a title he deserves. The irony is that as Amazon’s army of AI evaluators decided, thanks to their Byzantine algorithms, that my novel was unkind to Putin and therefore ineligible to have its own paid marketing campaign, their biggest advertised product was the latest Jack Ryan series on Amazon Prime, which took place in Russia and did plenty of Russia-bashing. Of course, they had the enormously talented John Krasinski. I … didn’t.

But this is not about sour grapes or Amazon bashing (it isn’t even about Russia bashing). This is about the role that technology increasingly plays in our world, and the fact that while its value is beyond reproach, it does deserve to be questioned before it’s implemented. 

I’ll start with the book. It’s a great story: even without Amazon’s help, it has sold well. And to Amazon’s credit, yesterday, right after I launched the marketing campaign for Russet, I tried again to launch a campaign for Brightstar, and lo and behold, they allowed me to do so. Not sure what changed, but the campaign is now active.

Here’s the point I want to make. I tried for a week to speak to a human at Amazon about their refusal to allow me to advertise the book. But the decision to give Brightstar a thumbs-down for a marketing campaign, a campaign that I have to pay Amazon for, was made (apparently) by one or more AI instances without the benefit of a human in the loop. After a week of trying to get somebody on the phone to explain to me why I was ineligible for Amazon’s marketing services, I gave up and went elsewhere. “Elsewhere” turned out to be a very effective choice, and the book sold very well. It still does.

So, why am I telling you this? To sell books, of course, but there’s another reason, one that’s more important. For 43 years, I worked full-time in the technology, media and telecom industry: more than a decade in the telephone industry, network analysis and IT mostly, then ten years as a senior consultant with an advisory professional services company, then 24 years on my own as a consulting analyst to companies striving to understand the implications of technological change for their businesses. I did this work all over the world, in more than 100 countries. What I discovered in all those years of focusing on the contact point between people and technology is that technology is a game-changer. I have watched in humble awe as it catalyzed education, reinvented healthcare, made government more transparent, forced a shift in power from the few to the many, grew local, regional, and national economies, empowered individuals, and created hope—so much hope. Here are some examples.

I sat on the ground with a group of educators in the shade of acacia trees and watched as the kids from a local rural school unpacked the bright green laptops they had been given by the One Laptop Per Child Project. The adults were largely mystified by the machines, choosing instead to immerse themselves in their mobile phones. Within a half hour, the kids had created social media accounts and were online, chatting with people all over the world. By the end of the day, the machines were old news; they had become experts.

I watched in awe and with no small number of tears as an elderly woman in a different African village was handed a mobile device for the first time and told to push a particular number on the screen. Within seconds, she was videoconferencing with her son, whom she had not seen or communicated with directly in ten years. He left the village to get work in the city; the arrival of mobile connectivity and solar charging stations in her village made it possible for her to routinely speak with distant family members.

In Ghana, in west Africa, an organization I had the opportunity to work with decided to tackle one of the country’s greatest challenges: adult literacy. Without literacy a person can’t take a driver’s test, can’t read road signs, can’t read a map, can’t read medical prescriptions, can’t help their children with their homework, can’t fill out a job application, can’t read loan documents, can’t read a services contract. In Ghana, large swaths of people may not be able to read, and the remote villages may not have running water, or sewer, or electricity, but everyone has a mobile phone—everyone. So, the folks I got to know came up with an idea: let’s send reading lessons as text messages to peoples’ phones. They did. The result? A climb from complete illiteracy to a grade eight reading level in eight weeks.

In one of Southern Africa’s slums, I was invited into a rural clinic by a healthcare organization I was working with. The clinic was a metal shipping container that had been divided into two rooms, one twice the size of the other. The larger room served as the waiting room, exam room, diagnostic center, and prescription dispensary. The smaller room was a full-blown surgical suite. I was invited to sit in while a patient had her gall bladder removed. The procedure took 40 minutes from open to close; they sent her home that afternoon with a bottle of aspirin, four tiny puncture wounds in her belly from the surgical tools, and four band-aids. Nothing magical about this story until I tell you that the procedure was performed by a team of surgeons who were located at a hospital in Maryland, 7,500 miles away, using a robotic surgery machine. The machine was connected on each end to an optical network that provided the bandwidth necessary to perform the procedure remotely.

One of the most poignant photographs I saw during the Arab Spring uprising was of a group of teenagers running past a low brick wall on the perimeter of Tahrir Square in Cairo. The wall was splashed with graffiti, French words that said, “Thank you, Facebook. Thank you, Twitter, for our freedom.” I’m no fan of social media—I believe it has largely become a corrosive and destructive force in modern society—but during Arab Spring, it gave voice to those who for so long had not had one.

Finally, a personal note about the role that technology has played in the lives of so many. The first time I went to South Africa to do work for the small university that became such a big part of my life, I had been there for three days when the founder and chair of the school told me that they had a graduation taking place the next evening and asked if I would please be their commencement speaker.

“Tomorrow? Sure … I think,” I fumbled out a response. Not much notice for a commencement speech.

So, I prepped and got ready, fully prepared to say all the appropriate things. The next evening, we all filed into the auditorium in the standard processional to the familiar tune of Pomp and Circumstance, and sat in the front row. The graduates sat behind us, resplendent in their caps and gowns. One by one they stood when their names were called and climbed to the stage, where they were presented with their rolled certificates.

In the audience, tears flowed on the faces of the gathered family members. What an amazing thing this was: their child was graduating from a university program. 

What I haven’t told you is that these students were not graduating with two-year or four-year degrees, nor were they graduate students. They were employees of various South African companies who had attended and were graduating from a one-week Microsoft Project course. Sounds silly, doesn’t it, to wear caps and gowns and march in a processional? It’s not. It wasn’t all that long ago that these students, all black, were denied access to education in general and would never have had the opportunity to graduate from ANY kind of program, degreed or otherwise, much less from one offered at a highly regarded university.

I won’t bore you with the post-graduation gathering, or the emotional, heartfelt tributes I heard for the next few hours, or the number of hugs I got from graduates, or how humbled and lucky I felt just to be part of the ceremony, but I will say this: technology, whether it’s telecom connectivity, or telemedicine, or the extensive tentacles of the Web, or videoconferencing, or a company’s need to train its employees on the use of a project management application, changes lives. It makes us better people. It gives us the velocity and acceleration we need to move forward, always forward. It can be one of the most powerful eliminators of social and economic inequality ever created. Technology can be, in the truest sense of the word, awesome—as in, awe-inspiring.

But to be fair, tech also has its dark side. Computers and mobile devices tear at the fabric of community, all-too-often forcing us into fearful and paranoid communities of one, obsessed with fear of missing out and not being good enough, smart enough, thin enough, pretty enough, or connected enough. Social media then pits these one-person communities against each other, emphasizing our scant differences while minimizing just how similar we really are. It’s a tragic addition to our reality, it’s destructive, and it’s dangerous.

Artificial Intelligence, the latest innovation to be added to the technological pantheon, is, like all technologies, an amazing thing that has enormous potential. But it also has the potential to make us complacent and lazy, convincing us that its ability to replace human function is up to the task, when in fact it’s not—not even close. It causes us to develop blind spots, makes us believe that good enough is good enough and that the status quo is as good as it gets. Meanwhile, ubiquitous, near-seamless broadband connectivity enrolls us all in a cult of speed, driving us to worship velocity rather than being part of a community of goodness and richness and caring for each other.

As I said at the beginning of this essay, I spent my entire professional career in the technology world, which means that I am no stranger to it. It also means that I appreciate what it does for us in all its many forms, and am sometimes awed by its breathtaking complexity, carefully hidden from view by those who developed it. But I also bear a sense of healthy skepticism about technology because of its potential to do us harm. I can quickly assemble a new piece of furniture with a screwdriver, but I can also stab somebody in the eye with it. Alfred Nobel invented dynamite as a way to cut roadways and tunnel through mountains and accelerate the pace of human infrastructure development; he was deeply saddened when it became a central component of mass warfare. AI can revolutionize healthcare, engineering, and the arts, but as we’re now seeing, when co-opted by ne’er-do-wells, it can be turned into a destructive weapon with great effect.

Two lessons emerge from this essay, one of them admittedly selfish (I’d like people to read Brightstar because it’s a GREAT story with a GREAT ending). The first is to make what I believe is a very, very important observation that we must all keep in mind. Technology in and of itself is always—ALWAYS—a sideshow attraction until it is put to good use by a human. Robots, for example, like AI, cannot begin to replace human capability and capacity, but they can augment it. Remote video is wonderful, but it will never, ever replace a handshake and a conversation over a cup of coffee. I love email, but quite a few of my friends and I exchange hand-written letters several times a year, the receipt of which makes me feel good for days after opening the envelope. Fear not, humans: technology augments us, not the other way around. Never lose sight of that.

My second observation is that I wrote Brightstar to show what happens when an innovative new technology, wielded by people who have their heads screwed on right, wreaks havoc on totalitarian, despotic regimes that would oppress their own people in the name of power-grabbing. The description on the back cover says it all:

Jason and Nicky are much closer than most brothers—they are best friends, growing up in a military household, moving constantly, with an alcoholic, abusive father and a caring mother who tries to shield them from their father’s demons. When Nicky dies in a freak accident, Jason is devastated. He ultimately recovers and joins a company that has developed a remarkable radio-based communication technology called Brightstar that, when deployed, will become one of the most powerful allies to freedom and one of the greatest threats to totalitarianism the world has ever seen.

When a natural disaster gives the company the chance to deploy their new technology to save countless lives, another opportunity unexpectedly arises. Regime change is underway in Russia, and the challenger to Putin sees Brightstar as the lever he needs to bring about hopeful change in the country. It becomes Jason’s job to deploy it—in the face of an incumbent regime that will deny its installation at all costs. 

The book ends with a shattering, unexpected conclusion that will stop readers in their tracks and make them beg for a sequel.

The Brightstar technology does one thing very well: it catalyzes the democratization of information. In other words, the more people know, the better informed they are about the fact and fiction that define an issue. And the more informed they are, the better they can make informed decisions, decisions that have a positive impact on themselves and their community. 

That, you see, is the power of technology. When it’s used to move society toward the future, when it’s used to shine a light on the things that don’t, it serves us as it should. But when it’s used as a bludgeon to disguise the beauty of our attainable future, to move us backward, to create divisiveness by falsely showing us how different we are in our wants and needs and desires, rather than how similar we really are, it does damage. Our job is to prevent that from happening. And that is what Brightstar is about.

By the way, if you’re interested in the Brightstar technology, I wrote a short essay about how it might actually work. I’m happy to share it with you. And if you’d like to read the book, check it out here: