People Get Ready

The consequence of the technological revolution is about to hit hard: employment opportunities will collapse across the board as new technologies replace labor. Moribund capitalism and talk of market solutions won't answer this crisis. In this brave new world, the power of the people to demand a smarter and more humane economic and environmental policy will be diminished as fear trumps reason and surrender replaces hope. Unless the tremendous benefits of technological progress are employed to serve the whole of humanity, rather than to enrich a handful of monopolists, the social contract will not be undermined--it will be broken. Americans cannot let corporate CEOs and billionaire campaign donors define their future. People Get Ready reveals that the choices made in the next few years will decide not just how technology is utilized and how economies are organized, but whether democracy will cease to function in any meaningful sense. This book, by two of America's leading champions of Net Neutrality and efforts to close the digital divide, links an urgent call for action with an outline of what must be done to move from crisis to hope. John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney argue that the United States needs a new economy in which the benefits of revolutionary technologies are shared by everyone, applied to effectively address environmental and social problems, and used to rejuvenate and extend democratic institutions and practices. Traveling the world, meeting with top innovators in the tech industry, and moving from the cloistered confines of Google’s Mountain View complex in California to the city streets where fast-food workers march for a living wage, the authors chronicle the effects of the tech revolution on the ground and in real time. With fearless analysis and their typically clairvoyant predictive powers, they propose a bold strategy for fighting back and democratizing our digital destiny--before it’s too late.