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
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
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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