Mixing expertise and passion, the author sets an agenda to rein in the tech behemoths that have run rampant for years.
A respected legal academic takes aim at the tech giants that are promoting isolation, division, and addiction.
Bernstein is a professor specializing in the laws around privacy and technology, but she notes that the motivation for this book was her experiences as a “mother of three children who grew up in the era of smartphones, screens, and social media.” Online technology, she writes, has metastasized from a public good into a problem threatening to unravel American society. She nominates 2007 as a turning point, when smartphones became ubiquitous and Facebook pushed aside its competitors. For a long time, the author believed that tech abuse was a personal problem (as well as a problem for parents), but as she dug into the research, she realized that tech companies were deliberately fostering addiction to boost their profits. She sees parallels between social media companies and cigarette manufacturers. Both knew that their products were addictive and harmful, but they suppressed evidence of that. Equally, some of the actions taken to combat big tobacco, from class-action suits to regulations requiring warning labels, could be applied to big tech. This has already begun, notes the author, and momentum is building. The tech companies, for their part, argue that the level of use of social media is an individual choice and to restrict it runs against notions of freedom and liberty. Bernstein replies that the tobacco firms used to make the same argument, but eventually the dangers posed by their products became too obvious to ignore. She makes clear that her goal is not to ban social media but to see it used in a balanced, honest, and responsible way, and she presents several workable policy options. But it will be arduous. “The tech industry is unlikely to submit to change without a fight,” writes Bernstein. “But knowing all we know now, neither should we.”
Mixing expertise and passion, the author sets an agenda to rein in the tech behemoths that have run rampant for years.Pub Date: March 31, 2023
ISBN: 9781009257930
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
© 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.
