Blown to Bits Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion

What you must know to protect yourself today


The digital technology explosion has blown everything to bits--and the blast has provided new challenges and opportunities. This second edition of  Blown to Bits delivers the knowledge you need to take greater control of your information environment and thrive in a world that’s coming whether you like it or not.


Straight from internationally respected Harvard/MIT experts, this plain-English bestseller has been fully revised for the latest controversies over social media, “fake news,” big data, cyberthreats, privacy, artificial intelligence and machine learning, self-driving cars, the Internet of Things, and much more.

• Discover who owns all that data about you—and what they can infer from it
• Learn to challenge algorithmic decisions
• See how close you can get to sending truly secure messages
• Decide whether you really want always-on cameras and microphones
• Explore the realities of Internet free speech
• Protect yourself against out-of-control technologies (and the powerful organizations that wield them)

You will find clear explanations, practical examples, and real insight into what digital tech means to you--as an individual, and as a citizen.

Hal Abelson is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and an IEEE Fellow. He has helped drive innovative educational technology initiatives such MIT OpenCourseWare, cofounded Creative Commons and Public Knowledge, and was founding director of the Free Software Foundation.
Ken Ledeen, Chairman/CEO of Nevo Technologies, has served on the boards of many technology companies.
Harry Lewis, former Dean of Harvard College, is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard. He is author of Excellence Without a Soul: Does Liberal Education Have a Future?
Together, Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis have taught Quantitative Reasoning 48, an innovative Harvard course on information for non-technical, non-mathematically oriented students. 
Wendy Seltzer, is Strategy Lead and Counsel to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). She has served as a Fellow with Yale Law School's Information Society Project, Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy; the University of Colorado's Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship; and Harvard Law School's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

1. Digital Explosion: Why Is It Happening, and What Is at Stake?
2. Naked in the Sunlight: Privacy Lost, Privacy Abandoned
3. Needles in the Haystack: Google and Other Brokers in the Bits Bazaar
4. Secret Bits: How Codes Became Unbreakable
5. Balance Toppled: Who Owns the Bits?
6. You Can’t Say That on the Internet: Guarding the Frontiers of Digital Expression
7. Bits in the Air: Old Metaphors, New Technologies, and Free Speech
8. AI and Algorithmic Decisions
9. Bits Become Physical
Conclusion. After the Explosion Appendix: The Internet as System and Spirit