Powerful insight into a ubiquitous yet still shadowy company.
A tech journalist traces how YouTube works—or fails to.
Bloomberg reporter Bergen seeks to bring the behemoth into the light. Though YouTube has billions of users and countless hours of content, the founders of the company—Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim—are largely unknown outside of the tech industry. YouTube’s current CEO, Susan Wojcicki, has a low profile by the standards of the social media business. When it started in 2005, the concept of having users provide content was simple, but the mechanics were complex. Once the site was operational, the growth rate was astonishing. Videos about games, music, fashion, celebrities, and, of course, cats: There seemed to be something by—and for—everyone. When Google paid $1.65 billion for YouTube 10 months after its launch, it seemed like an incredible amount. Of course, it turned out to be an excellent investment. The massive size of YouTube, however, presents a host of managerial problems. “It’s a tanker, an enormous business steered with small, careful turns,” writes Bergen. “Even if she wanted to, Wojcicki probably couldn’t steer it entirely in a chosen direction. She is a steward of a platform with a life of its own.” A central issue has always been the proliferation of posts that were unsuitable, including fake news, pornography, conspiracy theories, and terrorist videos. They appear faster than the algorithms and moderators can deal with them. The deluge stemmed from the open-to-all business model, and constant changes to the rules have often generated more confusion than clarity. As the author shows, all this raises fundamental questions: When does content moderation become censorship? Where is the line between disinformation and a different opinion? What are the obligations of a social media platform? There are no easy answers. Bergen mostly keeps the story straight, but any account of the company is going to be a tale of barely controlled disarray. That is part of YouTube’s attraction—for better or worse.
Powerful insight into a ubiquitous yet still shadowy company.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-29634-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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