Maria Ressa’s inspiring guide to resisting Big Tech’s drive for world domination

Résumé détaillé

Maria Ressa is a Nobel Peace Prize winner, journalist, entrepreneur and master communicator. Her latest book is accessible, clear and truly inspires the reader to resist the tech…

Maria Ressa is a Nobel Peace Prize winner, journalist, entrepreneur and master communicator. Her latest book is accessible, clear and truly inspires the reader to resist the tech takeover that we are all living through.

The Fight Back draws on Ressa’s extensive career and experience to build out three expanding circles that we can all adopt to understand, defend and build our own fightback. Each of the three sections is punctuated with multiple 10-step summaries to capture the ways in which you can apply that chapter’s lessons in your own life.

This book is full of zingers that you’ll be poaching: “Without facts you can’t have the truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without these three, we have no shared reality.” And Ressa also packs in plenty of fascinating facts. For example, there’s a social media platform, Moltbook, for AI agents, where within two days of its inception, they created their own religion.

The first section, Understand, connects the rise of tech power to the rise of authoritarianism. It also illuminates what we know to be true but find so hard to name - the insidious ways in which technology has crept into every aspect of our lives, and the dangers that this presents, such as cognitive debt and cognitive surrender.

In section two, Defend, we learn how Ressa has spent her entire career mastering and pushing back against this technology. Her practical tips, from a personal tech-usage level right through to UN reform, are genuinely actionable and helpful. A lot of the methodology in this section is preventative, recognising that the backslide of accountability that happens when corruption takes hold is much harder to retrieve, so it’s crucial to build for it before it happens.

And finally, in Build, Ressa’s message becomes truly audacious. Build our own infrastructure to challenge that of Big Tech, use the technology itself to create new and better laws.

Début de l'article, extrait de The Irish Times. Pour lire la suite, ouvrez l'article chez le média.