Two non-fiction books on the global impact of technological change  Is Digital Better?

Everyone is currently talking about the transformative potential of digital technologies. The jury for the 2025 German Non-Fiction Prize also nominated two titles that deal with the influence of technological change on our society. Both reveal downsides as well as glimmers of hope.

When talking about the “digital revolution”, the media has often resorted to the same stereotypical success stories for decades: brilliant young men tinkering away in their parents' garage on the next million-dollar idea, or young people sitting on beanbags in ultra-modern offices, giving free rein to their creativity. Ingo Dachwitz and Sven Hilbig wanted to challenge these Eurocentric clichés about how the modern tech industry works. In Digitaler Kolonialismus (Digital Colonialism), they talk about the dark side of the digitalisation business. They draw attention to how global dependencies from the colonial era continue to have an impact in the age of artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

The book, with the dystopian subtitle “How tech companies and major powers are dividing up the world among themselves,” focuses on the so-called “Global South” and its role in the digital industry's value chain. Millions of people in Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia use their manual labour every day to ensure that modern technologies function. Most of them live in extremely precarious conditions; their everyday lives are characterised by exploitative working conditions, poor pay and constant insecurity due to a lack of health insurance and pension provision. This “invisible army of data workers” is indispensable to large tech companies. However, their role is denied by the fact that public attention is mostly directed towards Western company headquarters such as Silicon Valley in California.

Measures Against Constant Stress

Dachwitz and Hilbig spoke to the people whose “ghost work” makes the narrative of progress in digital companies possible in the first place. Protagonists such as William from Nairobi give harrowing accounts of the traumatic activities that are necessary to train AI systems or moderate social media platforms. The psychological strain is enormous: every day, “clickworkers” are confronted with the worst horrors of the internet. Every second, they have to evaluate digital content, including hate speech, pornography and depictions of violence, due to strict quota requirements. “I have lost my faith in humanity,” William reports in an interview. Nevertheless, the young Kenyan has decided to take the initiative and organise himself together with colleagues. The report on the emerging labour dispute and the associated global solidarity are among the few glimmers of hope in the narrative.

A Faint Glimmer of Hope

The other topics covered in the book are no lighter fare. They include the wealth of data held by large corporations, which gives them unimaginable power, and the unequal exploitation of resources, which has colonial overtones, particularly on the African continent. Cobalt and lithium are indispensable to the digital industry, but resource-rich countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo benefit little from their extraction. Instead, the population suffers from the social and environmental consequences of heavy industry, while large profits are made elsewhere. The dangers of censorship, surveillance and state control with the help of digital technologies are also addressed, as is the ambivalent role of Europe. Europe likes to portray itself as a protector of human rights in the digital space, but it cannot escape the morally questionable constraints of the global race for digital hegemony.

In their book, Dachwitz and Hilbing present an “analysis and indictment of digital colonialism, not a guide to resistance”. Nevertheless, the authors hope that reading their book will encourage readers to question their own behaviour in the digital space, providing them with a “basis for informed action”. Finally, in the afterword by Guatemalan digital activist Renata Ávila Pinto, a hint of utopia shines through. It is entitled “A future without Big Tech is closer than we think” and paints a picture of the year 2050 characterised by solidarity, creativity and humanity in the digital space.

Harmony Is a Utopia

Martina Heßler also deals with visions of the future in Sisyphos im Maschinenraum (Sisyphus in the Engine Room). However, the author's primary concern is to question the centuries-old myth of the infallibility of technology. In recent years, this myth has been particularly popular with tech billionaires as a means of promoting their products in the best possible light. The multitude of “currently circulated AI promises” is not the focus of the narrative, but forms an omnipresent backdrop against which Hessler unfolds a detailed history of the dual figures of the perfect machine and the flawed human being, which can be traced back to the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. Driven by a desire for efficiency and a belief in progress, the idea of the superiority of machines became “a matter of course over the centuries, which was reproduced and multiplied without consideration and thus became enormously powerful”.

The author examines the relationship between humans and various machines: from factories and automobiles to lie detectors and computers. She observes an “endless spiral of technologisation” in the modern world, as humans develop increasingly complex technologies that, like Sisyphus in ancient mythology, present them with a never-ending task: the maintenance and further development of machines. The modern engine room in which we all live, thanks to the constant presence of technology in our everyday lives, has finally dispelled the notion that humans are inferior to the supposed perfection of machines. “To put it bluntly, new technology makes people look stupid at first,” but they usually learn and are not as dissimilar to machines in their fallibility as one might think. Errors arise in the interaction between humans and machines – consequently, they will remain part of any future, no matter how technologically advanced.

Pure Reason Must Never Prevail

The strength of Hessler's book, subtitled “A History of Human and Technological Fallibility,” lies in its historical depth. Nevertheless, the passages dealing with current events are of particular importance in the discourse on the fallibility of AI. In passing, the author first provides understandable explanations of how chatbots and language models work, before going on to discuss the manifold shortcomings that still plague them. Topics such as AI and bias, hallucinating AI and the derailments of malicious chatbots are addressed. Most important, however, is the realisation that the sometimes hysterical debate about the influence of AI on our coexistence can essentially be traced back to the old phenomenon of believing in the perfection of the world through machines. “Time and again, people overload machines with their expectations, as is the case today with AI, which cannot live up to these expectations.”

In the end, Hessler comes to a conciliatory, pragmatic conclusion: “Neither humans nor machines are perfect, but together they can cope with the complex world, so that, one might say, it's 'okay'.” We must therefore imagine Sisyphus as a person who can live with the fact that the dream of a perfect world through technology must remain an illusion.

September 2025