A loving critic hopes to resurrect the lost promises of the internet.
A nostalgic bid for a return to a more open, more diverse, and less commodified internet.
Jarvis—journalist, co-host of the This Week in Google podcast, author of The Gutenberg Parenthesis—believes that the internet, social media, and artificial intelligence are victims of a moral panic that seriously distorts their social and economic impacts. Attention-seeking politicians, dissenting technologists, academic doomsayers, and newspaper, magazine, and television pundits claim that these technologies are responsible for a variety of ills, from spreading hate and disinformation to corrupting youth and undermining economic competition. In its place, Jarvis offers what he deems a saner, more productive, and evidence-based assessment. Central to his case is that the internet, social media, and AI are mere tools, neither inherently dystopian nor utopian forces. Their problems are solely the responsibility of the humans who develop, manage, and use them. The technology, he asserts, is not complicit and not to blame. Because Jarvis considers the internet as primarily a culture of information and conversation, his main concern is with speech: how to ignore bad speech and encourage good speech. Regrettably, he writes little about how this might be done. His overall goal is to recapture the internet’s original intent of connecting people and giving voice to once-marginalized groups. To this end, he calls for restructuring the industry to be more “open and free,” demoting the geeks (he means you, Elon Musk), and finding ways to make the internet more local and community focused. These are not tasks he wants to give to government, however. Instead, Jarvis dreams of covenants in which we all “take on a sense of responsibility and obligation to one another.” Lacking a blueprint for making that happen, his well-intentioned book doesn’t seem to have much of a point.
A loving critic hopes to resurrect the lost promises of the internet.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781541604124
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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