How to Save the Internet review: Nick Clegg’s new tech book says nothing at all

How to Save the Internet
Nick Clegg (Bodley Head (UK, out now; US, 11 November))

I can pinpoint the moment when my brain refused to take in any more of Nick Clegg’s new book, How to Save the Internet.

It was on page 131, after a banal look at a future family whose lives had been improved by artificial intelligence, followed by a one-two punch of block-quoted chunks, first from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, then from an NPR article. I had to put the book down and walk away. I couldn’t hold out any longer. It was all too dull.

But because Clegg is a former executive at Facebook-owner Meta who had a front-row seat during the firm’s clashes with regulators – and was also the UK’s deputy prime minister from 2010 to 2015 – I felt there had to be something to learn here, so I picked it up again.

In his time at the company, Clegg witnessed some of Meta’s most consequential decisions across its platforms, such as the two-year ban placed on US President Donald Trump in 2021. He presumably has thoughts about the impact of Meta’s policies. Indeed, in How to Save the Internet, he claims he will set out exactly what big tech has got wrong (and right) and how our online world can be pacified despite the growing influence of authoritarianism.

Yet the book plods on without much wisdom, full of paragraph-length excerpts of other people’s journalism, research and even blog posts. When Clegg’s rare insights do appear, they are at this level of incisiveness: “if businesses and other organisations can do more in a working day, and quickly and automatically get insights from the data they hold, this will help them operate more efficiently”. Thrilling, this isn’t.

Even the book’s last chapter, in which Clegg outlines his grand plan to “save the internet”, is crashingly obvious. “The most dangerous thing for the US to do is to carry on with business as usual,” he writes in a world where Chinese AI model DeepSeek wiped $1 trillion off US stock markets in a day. Duh. A global deal to lock out China is needed, he says to a political readership that is already doing exactly that.

More compelling to me would have been an in-depth explanation of how and why Meta intervened after Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol in 2021, leading to the president’s ban. Instead, we learn that CEO Mark Zuckerberg let Clegg make that call, and he opted for the suspension. That’s it. Clegg was “acutely conscious that it was a big step for a private company, and one taken moreover without precedent and without a clear process to follow”. Little of the process that was followed is outlined. It happened, we are told, but not shown.

Quite why the book leaves so brief an imprint on the mind becomes clearer when you consider the author. Clegg spent years as a politician, then a tech executive, two jobs in which the less you can share about yourself with the public, the better. What greater sign of his success in these roles is there than writing a book that poses endless rhetorical questions such as “What is the likely socioeconomic effect of AI? Will it make inequality worse?” without answering them?

The problem with How to Save the Internet is that it tells you nothing. Both in terms of positioning – ever the politician, there is little that Clegg is willing to commit to firmly – and in recycling the same tired tropes you have read elsewhere. The internet’s roots are traced back to ARPANET and the military; AI isn’t actually intelligent; social media connects the planet, which is good, but also bad because some connections involve insults.

This is an after-dinner speech printed en masse, a think tank report in better binding and a fancy jacket. Save the internet? Save yourself the bother.

Chris Stokel-Walker is a tech writer based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

New Scientist book club

Love reading? Come and join our friendly group of fellow book lovers. Every six weeks, we delve into an exciting new title, with members given free access to extracts from our books, articles from our authors and video interviews.