An illuminating, provocative, and disturbing analysis of our current digital age.
A business executive in the tech space explores the problem of internet over-centralization and how it can be resolved.
The internet began as a “utopian dream” that promised unfettered access to information and the opportunity for global collaboration. Three decades later, the Silicon Valley giants that dominate it have led to what McCourt calls “digital feudalism.” The “black box” technology of proprietary algorithms has allowed corporations like Facebook and Google to treat users as little more than profit-generating information mines. McCourt, assisted by Money Reimagined podcast host Casey, suggests that this unchecked desire to control data for self-serving ends is at the heart of the dysfunction that now plagues American democracy. Not only has it led to the spread of socially divisive disinformation—as evidenced in the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018—on social media; it has also fostered blindness to such social media ills as cyberbullying, which in turn has given rise to a mental health crisis among younger, more vulnerable users. McCourt believes that the way individuals can reassert control is by using a Decentralized Social Networking Protocol, which offers users the ability to control “different types of information about them and their social connections.” The premise behind the author’s argument—that decentralizing corporate autocratic control over online information will be crucial to mending a broken democratic society—is undeniably important. His arguments are not without flaws, however—e.g., he fails to offer convincing arguments about how DSNP will motivate newly empowered individual users to consistently act in the “constructive, prosocial” ways that larger entities like Facebook and Google have not. Still, McCourt offers much-needed insight into a system that, as central as it has become to human life, poses threats to our freedom and well-being.
An illuminating, provocative, and disturbing analysis of our current digital age.Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728512
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
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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A timely, spirited collection.
A compendium of feminist perspectives.
Essayist, memoirist, and fiction writer Gay represents the history, scope, and challenges of feminism in a judicious selection of 65 pieces, some written by iconic feminist writers (bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Susan B. Anthony), others by collectives, and still others by lesser-known voices. Citing “dynamism” as her guiding principle, Gay has chosen works that are articulate, diverse, and hard-hitting. “I believe there is a feminist canon,” Gay writes, “one that is subjective and always evolving, but also representative of a long, rich tradition of feminist scholarship.” The pieces are grouped into eight thematic sections. Foundational texts include a statement of guiding principles for the 2017 Women’s March; early feminist texts begin with 16th-century scholar Henricus Cornelius Agrippa’s defense of women’s superiority and includes Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Anthony’s argument for women’s right to vote. Other well-known pieces include Judy Brady’s wry “I Want a Wife,” a 1970 essay reprinted in the first issue of Ms. magazine; Rebecca Solnit’s “Men Explain Things to Me”; and Gloria Steinem’s “If Men Could Menstruate.” There are also fresh surprises: “The Woman-Identified Woman,” a manifesto written by six women calling themselves Radicalesbians, argues that lesbianism is central to feminist politics “as an identity of political, cultural, and erotic resistance to patriarchy.” In “Girl,” novelist Alexander Chee reflects on gender fluidity, remembering being mistaken for a girl when he was growing up and revealing the beauty he finds when he puts on drag. With its capacious perspective, the collection speaks to a range of feminist concerns, past, present, and future. As Gay notes, “women’s bodies, movements, and choices are contingent on the whims of men in power. We have made progress but we are not yet free.”
A timely, spirited collection.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780143110392
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
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