A Thriller with Algorithms: The Silicon Jungle by Shumeet Baluja

The Silicon Jungle predicted long before the humongous Cambridge Analytica scandal - when private data of Facebook users were passed over to a private 'consulting' company to model voting behavior and political prefernes - the trecherous game of the algorithms. When global companies like Google or Facebook are storing billions of details of their users, allowing tracing everything from their personal preferences to consuming behavior, all you need is a good algorithm to know way too much about any one of the users.

Stephen is an enthusiastic intern with a good brain that landed at the famous - for the logic of the book - Ubatoo (a mixture between Google and Facebook) in the Silicon Valley. In less than 3 months he will acknowledge not only the big advantage of having the world's most powerful database as a playground but also the temptation of intruding into private lives. Who would not do it, after all, as you can only by curious about what other people are doing and thinking and eating. There are moral limits to this curiosity, but mathematically speaking, you can build a model and put it on trial and take it as a purely theoretical approach and experiment. McLuhan's observation that information is power still operates in the new 2.0 environment, it only gets even more powerful.

Stephen will enter into trouble by pure naivity and too much trust into the power of algorithms when he offers himself to help an activist for civil liberties. But there is no something like neutrality and being helpful when it comes to information. Depending of whom is using it, it turns to be a weapon of mass and self-distruction. And a thriller story where special intelligence - but not as intelligent as a young intern with lots of data at his disposal - agencies and terrorists also some academics naively believing that they can change the world as we know it through theoretical speculations only.

The book has a heavy informative technical algorithms-based background but in most cases succeeded to introduce it into the narrative. Although the risk floated in the air, it was avoided the impression of reading an academic research on algorithm and data instead of a work of fiction. 

There are so many characters in this book, not few of them greedy - either for money, for information, fame or both - but skilfully, the author outlines the good and bad side which resides in everyone of us. Sometimes, you only need some special circumstances to leave one part or another outshine. 

Although the future doesn't look always rosy, especially for the Internet users, Baluja avoided to use a dramatic pessimistic tone about what the future has in stock. It doesn't make predictions or allows deep - to be or not to be kind of meditations about life and how transparent our lives are becoming. It is a story using the modern background but it still stays a story, not political or futuristic and even less intelligence projection. But it seems that it made big media stories like Cambridge Analytica seen it coming. A good use of literary skills, anyway. 

Rating: 4 stars