System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot

System Error examines the critical challenges facing digital society through the lens of three Stanford professors with decades of experience in the tech industry. The book argues that big tech's relentless focus on optimization and efficiency has sacrificed fundamental human values, driving outcomes that reinforce discrimination, erode privacy, displace workers, and distort information. The authors contend that society has passively accepted a technological future designed by technologists, venture capitalists, and permissive politicians, without considering alternatives. They explain how the optimization mindset prioritizes what companies measure and care about over the values a democratic society might choose. When these optimizations scale widely, they impose corporate values on the broader population. Drawing on their backgrounds—a philosopher working in tech ethics, a political scientist who served in the Obama administration, and Stanford's undergraduate Computer Science director and early Google engineer—the authors reveal how technological power operates and how it can be held accountable. They present concrete solutions for understanding what is at stake and for controlling technology rather than being controlled by it.