The Memo That Called Itself a Prophecy

Chapter three of this book invents a thought experiment: Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, and Mauritania pool their filtering infrastructure into something the authors call a "Sunni Web" — sharia-compliant e-commerce, gay content blocked uniformly, a visa system for outsiders wanting in. It's offered as speculative illustration, a way of making balkanization vivid for readers in 2013. It reads differently now that Russia has passed an actual sovereign internet law giving the state a kill switch to disconnect RuNet from the global web, that India has built data-localization mandates with teeth, that the EU has erected its own regulatory perimeter and calls it digital sovereignty. The authors didn't warn about the splinternet. They described its user manual a few years before several governments filled it out. That's a different kind of hit than prescience — prescience implies distance from the thing predicted, and Schmidt was, at the time of writing, the man who ran the company whose global reach the splinternet was built to contain.

Which is the actual argument worth making about this book, and it cuts against a reflex I've indulged elsewhere in this collection — the idea that books which name a danger clearly get absorbed and neutralized by the systems they describe, understood and applauded and left un-acted-upon. That's the shape of *The Age of AI*, of *Neuromancer*, of half the warnings on these shelves. This book is not that. It isn't a Cassandra who gets ignored or metabolized. It's written by people already inside the machine room, describing the floor plan as a forecast. Cohen ran Google Ideas out of the State Department's policy planning staff before Google hired him to keep running it. There's no absorption problem here because there's no distance to absorb across. The forecasting and the building were happening in the same building.

That collapse of distance shows most nakedly in chapter seven, on reconstruction, where the authors name Naomi Klein's "disaster capitalism" thesis directly — crisis as opportunity for economic actors to impose reforms populations would otherwise reject — and then, a few pages later, describe Vodafone racing to restore service in Cairo before Mubarak finished falling, handing out free minutes, "because it wanted to reach a large Egyptian market that suddenly had a lot to talk about." The book's own language: telecoms will lead reconstruction "as nationalized entities or coalition partners if they are in the private sector," and "like others, they'll come to make money." They cite the critique and then perform it, unbothered, in the same chapter. I don't think this is a blind spot the era excuses. I think it's a company town's honest description of what a company town looks like from inside, mistaken by its authors for neutral futurism.

The book's chapter on identity leans on Alexei Navalny as its case study in digital-era political courage — the blogger-lawyer using online transparency tools to expose Kremlin corruption, held up as an example of the citizen empowered by connectivity against the state. Navalny died in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024. The book doesn't get this wrong exactly; it simply stopped narrating before the