A Book by Two From Google Takes a Deep Look at the Web

“The Internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history,” begins a new book written by two top Google executives, which aims to explain how this experiment will play out in politics, business and even personal lives. While the book, titled “The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business,” is not about Google, it does hope to benefit from the cachet of the Google executives who collaborated to write it: Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, and Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas. It grows out of an essay the two wrote for the November 2010 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine called “The Digital Disruption.” The article, which appeared before the citizen revolutions in the Middle East, was considered prescient because it predicted technology would empower citizens to stand up to despotism. As befits a book with large sales ambitions, “The New Digital Age” promises to be broad in scope, taking in how technologies will shape business and politics. According to the publicity materials, it will touch on future considerations such as how to curate an online identity, and it will also predict who will gain power from the Web.