A rueful, engaging discussion of the internet’s problematic centrality to these difficult times.
Expansive look back at fissures and missed opportunities in the evolution of “who wields power and who keeps it in check on the internet.”
As the special projects editor of the Guardian, Ball shared a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the Edward Snowden revelations. Now the global editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the author confidently assembles a critical history of the technology, politics, and business of online life, arguing that its appealing spontaneity invited unforeseen consequences, from financial malfeasance to authoritarianism. He keeps this sprawling account lucid, with eight chapters devoted to “The Architects,” “The Money Men,” “The Rulemakers,” “The Resistance,” and so forth. Ball begins with the internet’s birth via the academic-military collaboration of DARPA; its insular, improvised nature led to persistent ambiguities regarding control and security. Though these infrastructural issues were literally written on napkins, “the protocol they developed is of course the one still in use across the internet today.” Regarding the more recent web 2.0, the author argues that “the core of the internet’s harvesting of data is its business model.” This lies at the heart of today’s social unrest, from privacy erosions to accelerating disinformation. “The internet giants are viewed with mistrust, accused of playing a role in spreading misinformation, enforcing censorship and avoiding taxes,” writes the author. “Its billionaires are scrutinized and condemned for their working practices. Residents around the palaces of Silicon Valley have come to resent their corporate neighbours. Has the internet and the people running it changed so much in such a short time?” Ball captures the perspectives and backgrounds of a variety of significant players, from tech pioneers to privacy advocates; one venture capitalist suggests that time is running out to avoid a dystopia of class strife. In discussing online advertising, the author navigates the jargon to suggest that “when everything is data-driven, the advantages go to whoever has the biggest scale, and so the richest data.”
A rueful, engaging discussion of the internet’s problematic centrality to these difficult times.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61219-899-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
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
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
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