Chayka's timely investigation shows how we can reject the algorithms of the digital era and reclaim our humanity.
An important book about how to get out of the algorithmic box and make your own decisions.
Algorithms have become the secret drivers of Google, Instagram, TikTok, and all the other digital platforms, and they are having an insidious impact on how we think, consume, and produce, writes New Yorker staff writer Chayka, author of The Longing for Less. They continually collect data, feeding our past choices—and the preferences of other people—back to us. This process makes endless browsing easy, but it locks us in an echo chamber, slowly degrading our capacity for original thinking. It also affects the physical world, and Chayka offers an intriguing—and distressing—explanation of how all the coffee shops in the world came to look the same, thanks to Instagram and Snapchat. Our world has become filtered and machine-managed, with success measured in engagement metrics. As a remedy, the author offers interesting ideas for regulation, mostly focused on greater transparency. He admits that this would be hard to do, so he offers a more personal path. Undertaking an “algorithmic cleanse,” Chayka jumped off the social media sites that had taken over his life. For a while, he suffered from “fear of missing out,” but eventually, he felt his creativity returning. When he rejoined the online world, he ignored the constant flow of recommendations and looked only for the niches that interested him. During this time, the author discovered that guidance from algorithms is completely unnecessary. “Regaining control isn’t so hard,” writes the author. “You make a personal choice and begin to intentionally seek out your own cultural rabbit hole, which leads you in new directions, to yet more independent decisions…and, ultimately, a sense of self.”
Chayka's timely investigation shows how we can reject the algorithms of the digital era and reclaim our humanity.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780385548281
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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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