A heartfelt plea for greater vigilance in a world increasingly controlled by advanced digital technology.
The author of Rogue Economics warns us that “high-tech-savvy entrepreneurs” are monopolizing the economy, exacerbating inequality, weakening the state, and placing “the common good in jeopardy.”
Italian journalist Napoleoni believes that we live in a “new paradigm” of accelerating change in which the present and future overlap. In this “Present Future,” she writes, “humanity and politics seem unaware of the empowering of technology and refuse to embrace the epochal change that will allow us to leap into a better future.” The villains are cyberpunks whose quest for individual freedom and mistrust of government have led to such problematic technologies as cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens, and artificial intelligence. Moreover, the digitalization of money and its unrestrained printing are undermining both Wall Street and the state as a whole. Tech titans such as Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are particularly dangerous. Napoleoni’s gallery of malefactors also includes the Space Barons—e.g., Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson—who are using satellites and reusable launch vehicles to commercialize low Earth orbit. The Space Barons also tout the colonization of space, a project the author considers futile and a retreat from the challenge of climate change. She calls for national and international governmental bodies to rein in digitalization, but she also celebrates blockchain technology for its support of individual privacy, reliance on trust, and enabling of collective decision-making. Blockchain technology is revolutionary and “powerful enough to potentially redesign everything, including human relationships.” Napoleoni vacillates between a critical assessment of computerized technologies and enthusiastic embrace, while also being ambivalent about state regulation. Despite internal inconsistencies, her argument is well documented and addresses the real threat that the economy’s financialization poses to democratic institutions and personal freedom. We are, she claims, “sleepwalking towards dystopia.”
A heartfelt plea for greater vigilance in a world increasingly controlled by advanced digital technology.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781644213292
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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