Book Club: The Transparent Society by David Brin

David Brin has written some pretty famous science fiction books; you may also have heard of the film The Postman (made into a movie with Kevin Costner.) And if you’re following Apple’s Foundation series, David wrote one of the posthumous books that built on Isaac Asimov’s original work.

David consults for government agencies like the CIA, helping them to understand the future. He’s written several non-fiction works including The Transparent Society and Vivid Tomorrows.

His uncompromising, rational approach to tech—it’s inevitable, so what will we do about it?—is fascinating, and hard to dispute. The Transparent Society was originally published in the nineties, so some of it is frighteningly prescient and some of it naively utopian. Either way, it paints a picture of very different privacy in coming years. His more recent look at how Hollywood storytelling helps envision the future, Vivid Tomorrows, can show us a better way forward.

From time to time, we run Book Clubs to discuss the latest in digital transformation and public sector innovation with fellow leaders and noted experts. Each session is a candid online conversation, in which we cover a brief synopsis of a book and its key ideas, followed by an open peer discussion with the author.