Digital is Destroying Everything: What the Tech Giants Won't Tell You About How Robots, Big Data, and Algorithms are Radically Remaking Your Future

Every year, perhaps even every week, there is some new gadget, device, service, or other digital offering intended to make our lives easier, better, more fun, or more instantaneous--making it that much harder to question how anything digital can be bad for us. Digital has created some wonderful things and we can hardly imagine life without them. But digital—the most relentless social and economic juggernaut humanity has unleashed in centuries—is also destroying much we had taken for granted. And what is your place in this brave new world?

In Digital Is Destroying Everything, futurist and digital marketing consultant Andrew Edwards tours the “blasted heath” digital is leaving behind and takes a fearless look at the troubled landscape that may lie ahead. The book is not, despite its title, a dystopian rant against all things digital and technological. Instead, expect to find a lively investigation into the ways digital has opened us to new and sometimes quite wonderful experiences, driven down costs for consumers, and given information a chance to be free. But the book also takes a clear-eyed look at many of the good (and sometimes bad) things—businesses and behaviors—digital has destroyed, and how the world may be diminished, compromised, and altered forever in its wake. This tour of the effects of digital technologies on our lives is sure to raise questions, touch a nerve, and enlighten even the most dedicated digital enthusiasts.

Andrew V. Edwards is a digital marketing executive with twenty years of experience serving large organizations, and has been an operating executive and digital marketing consultant since the 1980s. Currently he is a Partner at Efectyv Digital, a strategic consulting firm. In the 1990s he pioneered web development and was involved in early tests of interactive television. Since 2002, Edwards has been consulting with Fortune 500 companies about digital analytics. In 2004 he co-founded the Digital Analytics Association. A recognized thought-leader in the industry, Edwards writes regularly for ClickZ, the world's most complete information source about digital marketing; and has spoken at events like eMetrics, the OMMA Mobile Conference, The DMA Conference, The DAA Symposium and at ClickZ Live. His blog can be found at Tomorrow's Ghost - By Andrew Edwards