A disturbing examination of how social media technology spun out of control and what it means for the future.
Who is in control of our massive social media networks? According to this thought-provoking book, no one.
For the many Americans who feel that the past 15 years has been an endless cascade of crises and confusion, Auerbach presents some interesting observations. The author worked as a software engineer at Microsoft and Google, so he provides expertise as well as an understanding of tech companies. The central cause of the chaos is the rise of the titular meganets. The author defines a meganet as a “persistent, evolving, and opaque data network joining humans and computers.” Facebook is the best illustrative case, but there are others, and they share the characteristics of unprecedented growth in size and speed. Despite armies of programmers and incredibly complicated algorithms, as well as CEOs and governing boards, control remains elusive. The pace at which information is input, disseminated, and copied defies attempts to impose order. Even if Mark Zuckerberg and others wanted to prevent the spread of disruption, trolling, and disinformation, they are no longer capable of doing so. Determining which information is valid and useful is effectively impossible when every view has not only contrary data, but a slew of opposing opinions. The other side of this is the collection of huge amounts of data on individuals, with sorting and collation done by sophisticated AI technology. Auerbach takes the view that AI is not as reliable and unbiased as many want to believe, and he explores several instances where it has gone frighteningly wrong. Even more, it is a feature and not a glitch that the feedback process promotes extreme views and belligerent rhetoric. Auerbach proposes technical ideas to tame meganets, but they don’t sound persuasive. “We search for where the power really lies, when it does not lie anywhere,” he says. “Or else it lies everywhere at once, which is no more help.”
A disturbing examination of how social media technology spun out of control and what it means for the future.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781541774445
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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