A melancholy, well-researched tour of faith and tech and the dissatisfactions of both.
An exploration of how technology has co-opted the metaphors of religion, with uncanny and discomfiting results.
Essayist O’Gieblyn is a former Bible school student who lost her faith, but living in the real world is no escape from spiritual discourse, especially when it comes to the internet. Much of this intellectually wide-ranging, occasionally knotty book turns on the ways we reflexively apply religious imagery to online life, “constantly, obsessively enchanting the world with life it does not possess.” The author begins her considerations concretely, discussing her relationship with an Aibo, a robotic dog loaded with convincingly doggy idiosyncrasies; bonding with the machine, she wonders if humans are built “to see life everywhere we look.” And if that’s irrational, what’s the rational approach? To a surprising degree, she finds, scientists can’t escape a kind of modified God-talk despite their learnedness and rigor. They speak of “emergence” of group consciousness online, ponder the mystical unknowability of matter in quantum physics, or propose that we might all be living in a computer simulation, a theory O’Gieblyn reads as old creationist wine in new bottles. The author is a whip-smart stylist who’s up to the task of writing about this material journalistically and personally; her considerations encompass string theory, Calvinism, “transhuman” futurists like Ray Kurzweil, and The Brothers Karamazov, which features “a moral drama that for me has lost none of its essential power.” Though sometimes overly digressive, toward the end the author sharpens her concern that “enchanting” the internet risks our being blind to how it exploits us: “We are indeed the virus, the ghost in the machine, the bug slowing down a system that would function better, in practically every sense, without us." The machines aren’t alive, but that doesn’t mean they’re not taking over.
A melancholy, well-researched tour of faith and tech and the dissatisfactions of both.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-385-54382-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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