Books

The security paradox  densediscovery.com

Living in 2026 consists of fighting with other people on multiple fronts, which has become normalized as “competition.” This applies to everything and always generates a paradoxical effect: the intensification of our private daily wars worsens everyone's lives.

In the latest edition of the Australian newsletter Dense Discovery, Kai drew attention to the book Trapped: Life under security capitalism and how to escape it, by Setha Low and Mark Maguire.

The authors argue that “security has morphed from an inalienable right into a commodity hoarded by those who can afford it,” stimulated by an industry that continues to invent increasingly invasive gadgets and software under a promise that is never fulfilled. This macabre market no longer generates security; it generates fear:

The more you securitise your life, the more those walls and gates and guards make your life all about fear rather than less about fear. And so, as the fear grows, then you want more security, you buy more gadgets, you support all kinds of policing initiatives.

The paradox appears when you take your head out of the ground. The apparatus, delusional in essence, ultimately makes the world worse for everyone:

“[This creates] a self-fulfilling prophecy of fearful people wanting more security, the state and private sector producing it, only to make the world more fearful for some and poorly protected for others.

I think about this every time I pass walls with electric fences and barbed wire, affluent residential condos, CCTV cameras, and ostensive policing. This means that I have been thinking a lot, and increasingly, about the subject.

How technologies of connection tear us apart

The subtitle of Superbloom, the latest book by American writer Nicholas Carr, might surprise those who have never stopped to question or even observe the media: “How technologies of connection tear us apart.”

Sounds contradictory, doesn’t it? Yes, but it makes sense. With the delicious prose that’s characteristic of him — and which, from time to time, is offered to us in his newsletter —, Carr reviews the history of communication technologies from a new perspective, one in which, because of development focused on eliminating friction and accelerating the speed of information, the social fabric deteriorates.

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The genius boy

Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder, philanthropist, and one of the world’s richest people, has released an autobiography. It’s another step in his long-running campaign to distance himself from the image of the ruthless businessman of the 1990s, the one who was seen as a symbol of capitalism and, therefore, deserving of pies in the face.

Source code: My beginnings is the first of a trilogy that Gates promises to release in the coming years. It covers his childhood in Seattle, through his school and university period, to the early years of Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico, before Windows, when the company made its living selling versions of a Basic language interpreter for the handful of computer architectures that were popping up at the time.

Bill Gates’ story, at least as he tells it in this book, would make for a pleasant TV series, a coming of age set in a typical middle-class American suburb in the 1980s. Like a Stranger Things, but without the supernatural part…? Or, in a less popular but more accurate comparison (even in name), a Freaks and Geeks with more emphasis on the “geeks.”

Don’t be mistaken, this is a compliment to the narrative. It’s a really nice book!

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