Klimburg delivers an urgent warning that civil libertarians and cybernauts alike will want to heed.
Of the free internet and its discontents, who are many and powerful.
“Governments did not make the Internet,” writes cybersecurity strategist Klimburg, the program director at The Hague Center for Strategic Studies. Never mind that the backbone of the internet was in fact the creation of scientists working under the American government, the fact remains that entrepreneurs, cyberpioneers, techno-anarchists, hackers, and other such independent-minded spirits have been the chief engineers of a place where pretty much anything goes. Those days may be coming to an end, Klimburg warns, as governments and corporations seek increasingly to control the internet, both to monitor the behavior of users and to seize the broadcast capabilities of the medium to serve up state propaganda. The United States, writes the author, has long held that the internet is “a largely non-state domain” that works pretty well as it is, while such governments as Putin’s Russia believe that they should control their own portions of the Web, a position that China and much of the developing world also seems to hold—though, Klimburg notes, powers such as India and Brazil seem to be moving away from it, even as efforts are mounting in the U.S. to restrict online freedom. Given the “great cyber game” that is raging among state powers—witness the role of Russian hackers in recent elections outside Russia—and these efforts at control, the author foresees the possibility that much online activity may move to the “dark web,” where criminality and illegality may in turn corrupt the free internet. He argues that the present multistakeholder approach to internet governance is the best of all possible cyberworlds, and he recommends the formation of a kind of organization akin to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to represent these many constituencies while allowing for internet independence and a fully engaged fight against cyberinstability.
Klimburg delivers an urgent warning that civil libertarians and cybernauts alike will want to heed.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59420-666-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
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