A persuasive polemic aims to defang Big Tech—and improve life for everyone else.
Upgrading the online experience.
Doctorow coined the title word in 2022, comically capturing the zeitgeist-y view that today’s internet “sucks.” In this erudite yet breezy takedown of Big Tech, the novelist and activist targets deceptive search engine results, new “secret surveillance” tactics, and platforms that are increasingly hard to quit. The 2020s internet is frustrating and exploitative, he writes, because decades of corporate consolidation, enabled by permissive regulatory oversight, has resulted in “the cartelization and monopolization of our economy.” Thus occurs “enshittification,” under which companies without rivals “deliberately worsen” their services to enrich shareholders, mistreating customers without fear of consequences. The abuse varies by platform. “Once the fear of competition had been eliminated, making Google Search worse was a small price to pay for rising stock prices.” Subpar search results compel us to search again, enabling the company to show us more revenue-generating ads. Facebook uses a similar tactic, feeding us “ads and boosted content,” along with just enough useful stuff “to keep users glued to one another.” Sure, you can quit a platform, but you might lose contact lists or music you’ve bought. Doctorow devotes enlightening chapters to the push-pull between stockholder-pleasing tech executives and employees who don’t “put profit over mission.” Empowering the latter, perhaps through tech worker unionization, is key to better user experiences, he writes. The book’s final third offers ideas for encouraging competition and “high-quality regulations.” He’s for “muscular privacy” statutes and new standards that would make it easier to transfer data from one platform to another or use an iPhone without relying on Apple’s App Store. Doctorow has a gift for distilling complicated ideas. If we want a “new, good internet,” we’ve got to make Big Tech “weaker.” It’s a potentially galvanizing argument.
A persuasive polemic aims to defang Big Tech—and improve life for everyone else.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780374619329
Page Count: 352
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
