There’s no better history of the Wild West days of early social media than this one.
The founding editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News recounts life in the tech-startup trenches.
Jonah Peretti, co-founder of BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post, began his media career on a fluke note, engaging in what used to be called “culture jamming” with Nike, goofing on its labor practices by requesting a bespoke pair of shoes emblazoned with the word sweatshop. In 2001, he ignited what became one of the first instances of something going viral on the internet. That culture jamming of two decades ago would become the flame-war-scorched social media of today. So it was with the man who would become Peretti’s “nemesis, his archrival, and his polar opposite,” British immigrant Nick Denton, who obsessively gathered page views that could in turn be monetized in ad sales, yielding the Gawker website. By Smith’s account, although Denton was more businesslike, he was also wedded to click-bait gossip, if sometimes with a social purpose: “The Gawker scoop of his dreams had always been to out a gay, Christian Republican senator, and thus reveal right-wing hypocrisy in its most naked form.” Alas, he ran up against right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel instead, “a schemer who believed in revenge served cold,” who took years and spent a fortune to lay Gawker to waste. The author gives a detailed, smart account of the foibles of those early days, when no one knew how to conduct decent journalism and make money at the same time. His discussion of the Huffington Post is especially telling as a study in haplessness. Along the way, he tells entertaining out-of-school tales of the early Facebook, the Drudge Report, Breitbart, and Twitter. Self-aware and self-critical, Smith allows that while all these entities helped create today’s digital culture, it was often not for the better, even if Denton today voices hope for “a Talmudic internet still to be made.”
There’s no better history of the Wild West days of early social media than this one.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-29975-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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