The underside of digital technology on full, frightening display.
A study of the Chinese government’s sweeping surveillance program.
Chin and Lin, veteran reporters on China for the Wall Street Journal and other outlets, have spent enough time in the country to effectively trace the development of an extraordinary surveillance system, a defining feature of the Xi Jinping era. It began in Xinjiang province, supposedly to keep track of Uyghur dissidents, but the Communist Party leaders quickly saw the broader potential. Featuring a nationwide network of cameras feeding into a massive database, the program connects with online shopping giants such as Alibaba and Tencent, and it also extends to internet usage and mobile phones. Using this data, Chinese authorities established an algorithm-based “social credit system,” under which “responsible” people could be rewarded while others could be monitored and, if necessary, punished. “By solving social problems before they occur and quashing dissent before it spills out into the streets,” write the authors, [the Party] believes it can strangle opposition in the crib.” Another crucial piece is facial recognition software, and the government is reportedly working on “emotion recognition” software, aiming to pick up individuals who have not done anything wrong but might think about it in the future. “China’s leaders,” write the authors, “wanted to redefine government using the same tools that Google, Facebook and Amazon had used to remake capitalism….They could engineer away dissent. China would have optimization.” Party officials understand that most citizens will trade privacy for order. Worryingly, the system is now being exported around the world, with aspects of it appearing in India, Uganda, and Singapore. Occasionally, the authors wander away from their main theme, but they paint a grim, disturbing portrait that deserves close scrutiny, especially as the technology becomes more precise and easier to deploy. While tech giants in the U.S. “exploit this technology for profit…the Communist Party has adopted it as a means to maintain power.”
The underside of digital technology on full, frightening display.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-24929-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
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
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
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