A concise analysis of how best to live within the brave new smartphone world.
How the ubiquity of smartphones has transformed society.
Sociologist Aschoff (The New Prophets of Capital, 2015) provides both historical context and political insight, showing what is new in the current technological revolution and recalling earlier times when technology upended the status quo. As “the new Gilded Age” of the subtitle suggests, the author reminds us of how the automobile changed everything, especially the economy. Yet while radical change was widespread, society survived the aftershocks and advanced. “People have always been anxious about new technology,” writes Aschoff, without minimizing the profound imbalances the smartphone underscores, especially in terms of economic and social inequality. She shows how activists have used the smartphone to document police brutality against black citizens while police (and the government at large) have employed the same technology of interconnection for monitoring and surveillance. Two of the most important recent social movements—#MeToo and Black Lives Matter—are both phenomena that have spread virally through a culture enabled by smartphones. At the same time, this culture has allowed the mobilization of white nationalists and other dangerous elements. We get our news on our phones, form our political beliefs, and see them echoed by like-minded partisans. The smartphone has all but dissolved the distinction between the personal and the political while changing the way we shop, date, and present ourselves to the outside world, with which we so often connect by smartphone. All the while, we are enriching and enabling global empires through collected data and underpaid labor. “Our fantasies about the digital frontier,” writes Aschoff, “hide the hierarchical and ecologically destructive relationships of global capitalism.” The author doesn’t advocate for opting out, nor does she believe that the worst-case scenario is inevitable. Instead, she offers advice for pushing back and establishing some personal autonomy in the fight for “digital justice.”
A concise analysis of how best to live within the brave new smartphone world.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8070-6168-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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