I am one of those curmudgeons who is quietly celebrating the side-effects of the global pandemic: the almost magical decline in global transportation and its salutary effects on the environment: air so clean children in an Indian village can see the Himalayas for the first time; Arctic waters so quiet that whales can hear each other across a bay or even across an ocean; millions upon millions of automobiles standing unused in driveways and not belching carbon dioxide in office commutes; international air travel and cruise lines ground almost to a halt.

At what cost?

Ron Diebert tells us at what cost: ever-rising volumes of data traffic flowing over global digital networks. And rising volumes of data traffic are supplied by dirty electricity from coal plants in India, China, and the United States.

Huge volumes of fresh water are consumed to cool the data farms in temperate climates.

And ever larger quantities of rare earth minerals mined in dangerous open-pit mining operations in Africa, in China’s south and near the Mongolian border, even Australia.

To be fair, the cost of data flows cannot be laid at the feet of the pandemic. The transition to the digital highways began years before and accelerated with the dramatic rise in bandwidth, the decline in data storage costs, and the ever improving algorithms to transmit video.

Our “contact free” shopping experiences on amazon are what we see. What we do not see are the electricity consumption, the evil working conditions, the polluting courier trips, and the enormous generation of waste in making the slick electronic devices we are addicted to. Not to mention the lost jobs in local commerce.

The waste generated by our cupidity is merely one of several evils Ron Diebert tracks in “Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society.”

Most obviously there is the device addiction which interferes in our human relationships.

There is the role surveillance plays in commerce and capitalism, and the role surveillance plays in covert government operations and the abuse of such power.

Diebert returns to the concept of “surveillance capitalism” and how our preferences and digital wandering have become the means by which global giants like Google, Alibaba, Tencent, and facebook predict our purchasing behaviour.

I agree with him that that it is a serious infringement on our privacy, and a risk to our democracies. But we all surveil. I do it in my business. You do it in your home and neighbourhood. Our need to surveil, I think, goes even deeper than Diebert credits us.

Diebert correctly shines a light on the data spies corporate, government, and freelance. So much of what we say and think can be used against us for nefarious purposes, as we’ve recently witnessed in the tampering of cellphones by the Saudi government, the social credit system of the Chinese, and Russian GRU-financed hackers.

These data networks are not all for the good. There are some very bad actors. Diebert does not go into the gigantic porn industry. Nor does he wade into the money laundering occurring on a global scale. There are the tax havens, and the tax cheats, many of whom are using the global connections to steal or hide their fortunes.

Quite rightly, Diebert goes along with many other commentators that the answers to some of these problems include better international governance. As if that were likely.

He blames the lack of international coordination on the vice like grip of the corporate elites on commerce, somewhat like Naomi Klein. To some degree I’d agree, but watching the chaos in Washington DC this week I’d say that a lot of Americans are on board with fewer constraints, and less cooperation.

If you breath the word “socialism” in polite American society you are branded a radical and a Communist. Forget about cooperation from these people.

Diebert pleads for restraint in our consumerism and electronic habits; restraint in our government spy agencies; and constraint of the corporate data behemoths. ( )

This book comprises the Massey Lecture Series of 2020. The author, Ronald J.. Deibert, runs the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, where is a professor of political science. The Citizen Lab studies global security, information and communications technologies and human rights.

The author examines four "painful truths" about social media. The first of these is the economic underpinning of social media: personal data surveillance that is undertaken, often without our knowledge and sold by various platforms for uses we've never agreed to, or maybe haven't even imagined. The second truth explored relates to the interplay of social media and social psychology, showing how our emotions and even beliefs are shaped by various algorithms. Thirdly, the author examines the use of surveillance and spying by government actors. Finally, he explores the real carbon footprint of virtual technologies. The stories of these four truths gave me nightmares.

Luckily, the author also offers solutions to combat authoritarian governments, environmental degradation and rampant consumerism driven by social media. These solutions are easier said than done, and involve greater restraint on platform owners/designers, and individuals similarly exercising restraint in their reliance on them.

Very well written, in a clear, accessible style. ( )