A powerful cri de coeur for technological liberation that merits the attention of every consumer of digital services.
A manifesto demanding the right to privacy in the digital realm, a right firmly in the hands of the tech giants.
“If you have the latest Roomba vacuum cleaner, it is probably creating a floor plan of where you live.” So writes Véliz, a professor at Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI, who pairs the observation to a provocative, frightening thought: Imagine the possibilities if an authoritarian regime were to have “a detailed real-time map of every room and building in the world.” The temptation to abuse that power would be endless. So it is with the largest tech companies, which relentlessly collect data and write algorithms that are meant to exploit your presence on the internet, and not always in obvious ways. It’s not your data that’s being bought and sold, she adds, but instead “the power to influence you.” While it’s fairly benign to be influenced to buy a certain book or laundry detergent, that influence sometimes extends to the acceptance and propagation of vicious, even dangerous political lies. The “data economy” demands resistance, in part because democracies are always on the verge of descending into authoritarian states whose leaders have intentions “that may not favor the likes of you.” Such intentions are well served by “surveillance capitalism,” and they lead to such well-known episodes as the influence-peddling of Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. Other civil libertarians have mounted overlapping arguments, but Véliz writes clearly and without hyperbole. She is adamant on certain points: “stay clear of Androids,” phones stuffed with pre-installed apps that send data to third parties; avoid internet-of-things products that connect online, since “you don’t need a kettle or a washing machine through which you can get hacked”; and demand that government disengage from tech and make it possible for citizens to control their own data.
A powerful cri de coeur for technological liberation that merits the attention of every consumer of digital services.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-61219-915-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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