Book: thumbs-up. Subject: frown emoji.
An insider’s account of some very bad goings-on at Facebook/Meta.
Former New Zealand diplomat Wynn-Williams talked her way into an ambassadorial job of sorts at Facebook on the grounds that it was likely to become a political giant. She landed in 2011, thinking that the politics she had in mind would be for the good and that part of her job would be to keep the tech behemoth independent: “Information is power. At some point, governments would want to control it.” Warning signs otherwise were there from the start: An outwardly apolitical Mark Zuckerberg decides that he wants to be seated next to Raúl Castro at a state dinner. (He flees when rebuffed by not just the Cuban leader but by Canada’s prime minister.) A German delegation in turn is spurned when it asks for content mediation to curb hate speech: “We failed when it mattered,” Wynn-Williams writes. “With the country we most needed to win over.” Small wonder, she adds, that Germany opened an investigation on Facebook, which, jumping ahead in her narrative, explains why a company board member proposed courting far-right actors such as MAGA and Germany’s AfD—the thought being that less oversight over those who cozy up to them means more profit. China is the grand curiosity: “The mission of the company—making the world more open and connected—is the exact opposite of what the Chinese Communist Party wants, particularly under President Xi Jinping,” she writes at a time when the company is going hammer and tongs for market there. And now, the author says, Facebook is “dangling the possibility that it’ll give China special access to users’ data.” Among all this intrigue, Wynn-Williams’ accusation of some spectacularly louche and horndoggish behavior among the top brass seems an afterthought, but that gossipy element is there, giving a human touch to “these people and their lethal carelessness.”
Book: thumbs-up. Subject: frown emoji.Pub Date: yesterday
ISBN: 9781250391230
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: yesterday
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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