A startling vision of the present rendered from the chaotic noise of recent technological advancements.
A techno-environmentalist warning shot for the digital landscape’s impending doom.
In 11 searing essays, filmmaker and new media scholar Steyerl (Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, 2017, etc.) discusses cutting-edge advancements in AI and art and outlines the ripple of damage caused by competing tech companies. “The more one tries to preempt the future,” she writes, “the more the present gets out of hand.” Many generative AI programs use images scrubbed from the internet, regardless of copyright protections. A 2023 Hollywood strike protested against the use of AI likenesses in film. “The recent history of these apps,” Steyerl explains, “can be written succinctly through the different protests against them.” She positions seemingly harmless image-generation programs on the same spectrum as “warfare, marketing and surveillance” by detailing the harmful impact this boom has on marginalized communities around the world. One essay discusses how compromised immigrant populations are exploited as “a new, invisible global underclass of data proletariats.” In Kosovo, the region’s electricity is sapped by the crypto mining frenzy. In Kenya and Sudan, the cryptocurrency Worldcoin collects biometric data from underinformed volunteers via retinal scans. These unnerving texts are steeped in technical jargon that will challenge many readers but reward those who endure by offering a blistering new perspective. Steyerl uses thermodynamic terminology to explain image generation: “a detailed, intelligible image is seen as being ‘cool’, then is diffused into ‘hotter’, less organized articulations, and ultimately into random noise. Image generation proceeds by reversing this process of entropy and recovering, or ‘restoring’, an image from noise.” Later, this lingo leads to another dark observation: “workers in digital industries take on the role of noise particles, being burnt out, dispersed and moving about randomly, making them vulnerable to exploitation.” By highlighting a system of global damage incurred at the expense of new technology, Steyerl paints a rotten digital landscape on the brink of something terrible.
A startling vision of the present rendered from the chaotic noise of recent technological advancements.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9781804298022
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
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
© 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.
