A farsighted book that portrays the devastating consequences of unfettered surveillance capitalism.
The mutual exclusivity of democracy and surveillance capitalism.
Early in his prescient book, legal scholar Brescia points out a stunning irony. We all know this is the era of “surveillance capitalism,” in which the internet habitually violates our virtual space. We understand that purportedly free social media companies (a.k.a. “Digital Pinkertons”) effectively exist to co-opt and sell the private data (“political privacy”) that we inadvertently shed and surrender upon entering their sites. But few focus on the fact that this is happening because, on balance, while the law does not protect the integrity of our identity, it does protect that of the social media companies exploiting us. The result: relentless “digital abuse.” This all matters on a level far beyond that of the individual, Brescia says. For political privacy is critical to a functioning democracy, yet social media users are increasingly manhandled by third parties that analyze their online habits, texts, searches, comments, etc., to nudge them to actions they wouldn’t normally take, from buying products they don’t want, to casting self-defeating election votes. Indeed, the 2016 presidential campaign, marked by rampant misinformation, was all about manipulation via digital abuse, he posits (and might well have said about the 2024 election, if the book were written slightly later). Brescia explores in depth the different ways that “laws, norms, constitutional protections, and practices” surrounding political privacy “essentially provide immunity to those companies that have access to our digital selves [and] creates a form of moral hazard in which those same companies are largely free from oversight and responsibility.” But he does believe there’s hope if we follow the patterns of past successful civil rights movements, where there was a gradual convergence of understanding—coming from disparate groups of legislators, lawyers, academics, activists, and industry tycoons—that for democracy to thrive, it must protect and never again “extract” the teeming private selves at the heart of it.
A farsighted book that portrays the devastating consequences of unfettered surveillance capitalism.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781479832330
Page Count: 224
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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