A well-reasoned and well-argued case against extractive technology.
Venture capitalist and technology consultant McNamee (The New Normal: Great Opportunities in a Time of Great Risk, 2014, etc.) turns a hard eye on Facebook, a company in which he invested early.
Not long before the 2016 election, writes the author, he got the sense that something wasn’t quite right with Facebook’s general run of posts. He saw “a surge…of disturbing images, shared by friends, that originated on Facebook Groups ostensibly associated with the Bernie Sanders campaign,” all of them containing “deeply misogynistic depictions of Hillary Clinton.” This flew in the face of Sanders’ conduct, as did Facebook’s allowing a slew of “inorganic” propaganda promoting such things as Brexit. All of this led McNamee to the conclusion that social media is a more effective tool for spreading messages of discord, hatred, and fear than harmony—or, as he writes, “Facebook has managed to connect 2.2 billion people and drive them apart at the same time.” His warnings to Facebook’s executives, including the fellow he calls Zuck, have gone largely ignored, while Facebook has promoted algorithms favoring big-money advertisers that rely on exploiting the private data of its users. Even given this, and even given Facebook’s “monopoly power,” few users seem quick to shed the service or to acknowledge their addiction to it. More, such internet platforms “pollute the public square by empowering negative voices at the expense of positive ones," turning the free-speech mandate of the internet’s pioneers into a forum for bullying and bullhorns. Against all this, McNamee prescribes a diet that includes not buying into the vitriol as well as erasing one’s Facebook history and not using Google because of its exploitative data-collection policies, instead using neutral search engines that do not collect data—as well as limiting one’s social media time to a few minutes a day, recognizing that these platforms are fine examples of the law of diminishing returns.
A well-reasoned and well-argued case against extractive technology.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-56135-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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