A dense but thorough and authoritative condemnation of tech worship.
A media theorist dismantles the tech-centric fantasies of the wealthiest people in the world.
In this scathing book, Rushkoff opens with an account of a meeting he attended with five of the world’s richest men, who sought his opinions on their strategies to survive an “Event” that would render the world as we know it unlivable. These men and the rest of their technocrat counterparts suffer from what Rushkoff calls “The Mindset,” a worldview marked by a staunch bias toward quantifiable data and “a faith in technology to solve problems,” especially the problems that those billionaires’ own technologies have wrought. While digital technologies initially offered opportunities for more meaningfully connected and innovative ways of life, Rushkoff argues that the hopes were corrupted by market goals. As a result, new technologies were designed less for consumer satisfaction and more for investor profit. Another major detriment is the winner-take-all attitude among tech “innovators,” who aren’t interested in incremental progress as much as creating a singular invention for which they can take all the credit. However, notes the author, “these totalizing solutions perpetuate the myth that only a technocratic elite can possibly fix our problems.” Rushkoff describes an interesting connection between tech billionaires and the prominence of psychedelics in tech culture, further illustrating the need of the tech elite to believe that they are singularly capable of providing the solutions humankind needs—while getting rich in the process. The idea that technology can remedy the ills that technology created is founded on a faulty belief that only what’s quantifiable has value, but the “squishier” subjects and ways of thinking that explore our dignity and humanity are still important, and it is imperative we don’t leave them behind. Though Rushkoff occasionally displays too evident a disdain for his subjects, he writes with knowledge and authority. The text conveys an appropriately urgent and serious message, while the closing section offers sound reason for hope and reasonable steps to take for a better future.
A dense but thorough and authoritative condemnation of tech worship.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-393-88106-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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