A rueful, engaging discussion of the internet’s problematic centrality to these difficult times.
Expansive look back at fissures and missed opportunities in the evolution of “who wields power and who keeps it in check on the internet.”
As the special projects editor of the Guardian, Ball shared a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the Edward Snowden revelations. Now the global editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the author confidently assembles a critical history of the technology, politics, and business of online life, arguing that its appealing spontaneity invited unforeseen consequences, from financial malfeasance to authoritarianism. He keeps this sprawling account lucid, with eight chapters devoted to “The Architects,” “The Money Men,” “The Rulemakers,” “The Resistance,” and so forth. Ball begins with the internet’s birth via the academic-military collaboration of DARPA; its insular, improvised nature led to persistent ambiguities regarding control and security. Though these infrastructural issues were literally written on napkins, “the protocol they developed is of course the one still in use across the internet today.” Regarding the more recent web 2.0, the author argues that “the core of the internet’s harvesting of data is its business model.” This lies at the heart of today’s social unrest, from privacy erosions to accelerating disinformation. “The internet giants are viewed with mistrust, accused of playing a role in spreading misinformation, enforcing censorship and avoiding taxes,” writes the author. “Its billionaires are scrutinized and condemned for their working practices. Residents around the palaces of Silicon Valley have come to resent their corporate neighbours. Has the internet and the people running it changed so much in such a short time?” Ball captures the perspectives and backgrounds of a variety of significant players, from tech pioneers to privacy advocates; one venture capitalist suggests that time is running out to avoid a dystopia of class strife. In discussing online advertising, the author navigates the jargon to suggest that “when everything is data-driven, the advantages go to whoever has the biggest scale, and so the richest data.”
A rueful, engaging discussion of the internet’s problematic centrality to these difficult times.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61219-899-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
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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