A small-l libertarian battle cry for a technology that’s truly liberating, just as its pioneers intended.
A meaty manifesto for, among other things, returning the internet to the public domain.
“This is a book for people who want to destroy Big Tech,” writes free-speech advocate and science-fiction writer Doctorow. “It’s not a book for people who want to tame Big Tech. There’s no fixing Big Tech.” Do you hate Facebook? Most people do, notes the author, but we’re on the platform by way of the process of “network effects”—i.e., we are there because our friends are there, and our friends are there because we’re there—and no one wants to be the first to jump off. Still, Doctorow adds, there are ways to fight today’s tech giants. One example comes from Apple, which for years endured a Microsoft Word that was so flawed outside the Windows platform that it lost computer sales to Microsoft by virtue of those same network effects: People who relied on a reliable version of Word for their livelihoods stuck to PCs even if they hated them. The solution: Steve Jobs tasked a group of programmers with reverse-engineering Microsoft Office—figuring out how the program worked from the ground up—and then doing Office one better by creating the software suite originally called iWork, which could open Word documents. The result was that “Microsoft gave up” and turned Office into an open format. Doctorow revisits other stories that were less successful—Napster, for example, which revived long-out-of-print music but was crushed by a litigious recording industry, a success story that should have been but came up against the forces of monopoly and the legal system that makes it possible. Doctorow calls for more reverse-engineering, more “adversarial interoperability,” and more decentralized social media platforms such as Mastodon that, incidentally, are less likely to harbor trolls and Nazis.
A small-l libertarian battle cry for a technology that’s truly liberating, just as its pioneers intended.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781804291245
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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
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