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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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