21 Mitos Digitales – A Call Against Resignation

21 Mitos Digitales - Book“Cherish the moment” I told myself. I mean, I’ve had my work translated before. I once wrote the manuscript for a video game that was released in fourteen languages (it failed fourteen times). But this time is different. I can’t hide behind or share the glory with a development team. They are all my words. So I told myself to cherish the moment!

My book 21 Digital Myths is probably familiar to Netopia’s readers by now. But somebody actually made the effort to translate it to Spanish! And not just anybody, but Vicente Campos González who also translated the works of Thomas Pynchon (just to name one).

Here it is: 21 Mitos Digitales – Antidoto contra la posverdad internauta. That’s right, “posverdad” is Spanish for post-truth. The English “reality distortion antidote” became “antidote for the internet post-truth”. I can’t tell which one is more pretentious, but I love it!

Like a real author, I visited Madrid for the release. Two days full of meetings, interviews and speeches. I quickly lost track of what I had said to whom and who was who. I get why some bands greet the wrong town on their shows! (Or just say “Hello Cleveland” every time and you’re safe.)

Since the book was released in English last year, a lot of things happened (obviously). The attitude to the technology companies has begun to shift. More and more, problems like fake news, elections hacked, cyber-terrorism, ISIS propaganda, sexism, tax evasion, abuse of dominant position and more have stained the image of the Silicon Valley-companies as those cool geeks who want to make the world a better place and don’t care about the old rules. Increasingly, the conversation is about how to make the internet giants take more responsibility. The line “we’re just a tech company” is not the get-out-of-jail-free-card it used to be. In a way, my book made this argument and perhaps the shift in attitude makes it more interesting. Perhaps it needs some new chapters to reflect this change.

In any case, the Spanish journalists seemed to get the idea. I did not get any push-back about challenging the Silicon Valley-narrative. One of them said my book read as “a call against resignation”. Spot on! Wish I had come up with that myself.

You can find some of the press appearances here.

Now, how do I say “cherish the moment” in Spanish?