Civil libertarians as well as geopolitics buffs and tech geeks will find much of value here.
Media analyst and New York City government official Wichowski examines the evolving relationships of nation-states and technology firms in the modern world.
Building on a 2017 Wired article, the author proposes that tech giants such as Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft are “net states,” battlefields and weapons alike in the political and martial realm. “Net states are entities that act like countries,” she writes, as with Silk Road, which, though manifestly engaged in illegal activities, also had a kind of sovereign right over private data entrusted to it by its users. In that case, when two governments wrestled over legal access to that data, a tech company, Microsoft, sheltered it—a precarious situation, to be sure, inasmuch as tech companies such as Google and Amazon are in the business of selling cloud storage to both government agencies and private individuals who might rightly object to their data being sold. Wichowski examines the behavior of net states IRL—in real life, that is—in such places as hurricane-damaged Puerto Rico, where Tesla and Google turned out to be more helpful than the federal government. She looks deeply into issues of privacy and the rights of technology users, whom so many of the net states seem to regard as mere troves of data. Wichowski notes that infrastructure improvements are likelier to be made by net states than “real” ones, all with a clear eye toward a future in which they are truly sovereign. She concludes her eminently accessible, deeply researched exploration by proposing that business models change so that consumers can more easily protect their data—but for a price, for “if our data, privacy, and sense of power are precious to us, then we need to offer something else that’s valuable. And just about everyone values money.” That may strike some as blackmail, but it seems eminently sensible given how much of it is afloat in the world, especially in the hands of nefarious actors.
Civil libertarians as well as geopolitics buffs and tech geeks will find much of value here.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-288898-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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
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
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