A provocative, engrossing dialogue sure to raise eyebrows.
Two powerful, conflicting tech execs exchange thoughts on the future of the Internet.
In the early summer of 2011, while WikiLeaks was under full investigative crackdown, its Australian co-founder, Assange (Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, 2012), was under house arrest in Norfolk, England. When given a chance to be interviewed by Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, for a book he was writing, Assange welcomed the opportunity to possibly “understand and influence what was becoming the most influential company on Earth.” (Assange’s pan of Schmidt’s eventual book is dutifully included in this volume—“a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism.”) With neither technological revolutionary an advocate of the other’s philosophy, the sparks flew throughout their three-hour conversation, which is transcribed here. In response to Schmidt’s probing, Assange discussed his frustration with the URL system; Bitcoin’s statelessness; and WikiLeaks’ motivations and the development of its defining technology. This book also contains Assange’s heavily footnoted commentary on the preamble leading up to his discussion with Schmidt, its aftermath, and the prospects facing contemporary digital media. Assange describes Schmidt as a wunderkind who acts with “machinelike analyticity,” a quality apparent during the interview, even though their intricate verbal volleying becomes diluted by the hovering, intimidating presence of Jared Cohen, a former adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton and current director of Google Ideas. Their jargon-filled conversation will surely fascinate the tech-savvy and perplex neophytes while redefining both Assange and Schmidt as extremists in their shared passion for ushering in the next wave of digital development. Though the two men are opposites in their objectives, the book emphasizes their roles as visionary predictors forecasting the future of Internet communications.
A provocative, engrossing dialogue sure to raise eyebrows.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-939293-57-2
Page Count: 200
Publisher: OR Books
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
Strong language and strong medicine about the decline of the American economy, but marred by overwrought prose and Monday- morning quarterbacking. Rowen, a columnist for the Washington Post, attributes America's economic decline not to unfair trading practices by Japan or other external factors. It is, he says, a case of ``self- strangulation.'' Rowen examines the men and women who have made economic policy since the Johnson administration. Without attributing any venality (other than perhaps the playing of partisan politics) and admitting that people did the best they could, he nonetheless does assign blame for the low economic state to which the nation has sunk. Emerging from WW II as the only country with an industrial base untouched by war, the US was the most powerful nation on earth. Then, from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s, it went from the world's largest creditor to its largest debtor. Rowen ignores JFK, whom he knew personally and who arguably set in motion events leading to the problems Rowen cites. The current crisis, he argues, was initiated by Johnson's Vietnam adventure, which crippled the Great Society and set up a virulent inflationary cycle in its attempt to have both guns and butter. The blunders of LBJ gave way to Nixon's disastrous wage- and price- control attempts, and the abandonment of the gold standard. Ford and Carter were hamstrung by OPEC and were, according to the author, nothing short of inept. By far his harshest criticism is leveled at Reagan's ``voodoo economics,'' with its vain hope that wealth would trickle down from the top. Rowen also attacks Congress, describing it as spineless. For the future, he says, Americans will have to adjust to the economic rise of Asia, focus on high-tech industries, and become less greedy. Rowen's case is compelling, if not totally convincing. He also gives readers a poignant mini-memoir about the life of a newspaperman covering the powerful.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8129-1864-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
An absorbing biography that will help Stead's fans place her fiction in the context of her life and may well attract new readers to her work. Christina Stead (190283), who was born and died in Australia (about which, writes Rowley, she was ``both nostalgic and patronising''), did her writing during her years in Europe and the US. Although she tapped real events and people for her fiction—and not just for her autobiographical novels, including the superb The Man Who Loved Children—she could be secretive in her private papers, identifying people by fictional names, writing in code, and ultimately destroying many documents. Despite this obstacle, Rowley (an Australian academic, currently a visiting scholar at Columbia University) offers a coherent and convincing portrait that reaches back into a youth in which Stead was overshadowed by her father, who first instilled in her a lifelong socialist orientation, insecurity about her appearance (he dubbed her ``Pig Face''), and a yearning to be adored by a man. When she arrived in London in 1928, Stead found just the man—William Blake (originally Blech), whom Rowley succinctly describes as a ``Marxist investments manager who seemed to know something about everything.'' Blake hired her to be his secretary, and Stead accompanied him to Paris, where their romance flourished—despite a wife who would not divorce Blake for 23 years. When the bank employing Blake collapsed, the pair fled to New York. Stead's writings earned only modest royalties even when favorably reviewed, and Blake could not find work, so they returned to Europe in a consistently difficult hunt for economic security that gave their lives a nomadic flavor. By 1949, Stead said to a friend, ``I have been a writer, quite unsuccessfully for twenty years,'' although a revival of interest in her work, which began in the mid-1960s, helped her return to Australia in 1969 as a famous author and ``Official Personage.'' A welcome study of an underrated author. (16 pages of photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8050-3411-0
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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