The roots of a modern tragedy are exposed. Today’s workplace is not what it once was. Gone are the days of corporate loyalty and rewarding seniority found in the immediate post-WWII work environment. Today the rapidity of change impedes attempts to even describe the contemporary norm, and when dynamism becomes normal, Sennett (Flesh and Stone, 1994, etc.; Sociology/New York Univ.) worries about the impact the new workplace has on the people who work there. The belief that work is closely related to character has deep roots in Western society, and in an era where capitalism is evolving far more rapidly than human beings, there is good reason to worry. That a capitalist economy involves change, or uncertainty, or risk, is nothing new. Entrepreneurs have long driven the economy forward, in part, by embracing these conditions as the cost of potentially realizing large rewards. Today, however, conscious risk-takers have no monopoly on uncertainty; it’s “woven into the everyday practices of a vigorous capitalism,” and risk has become “a daily necessity shouldered by the masses.” Through interviews, observations, and statistics set against the background of a similar study undertaken 25 years ago, Sennett captures the tension this creates between contemporary work and human life. What is the place of commitment, sacrifice, caring for others, and looking beyond immediate personal satisfaction when work requires setting such archaic notions aside? In essence, there is a dissonance over time. The constancy associated with good character is directly at odds with the realities of the contemporary workplace: “the conditions of time in the new capitalism . . . [threaten] the ability of people to form their characters into sustained narratives.” Sennett is no Luddite, but this deeply provacative essay exposes the continuing human cost of progress. A depressingly perceptive analysis.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-393-04678-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
Fans of Markoff, Levy, Lanier et al. will want to have a look at this intriguing portrait of coding and coders.
Of computer technology and its discontents.
Computers can do all kinds of cool things. The reason they can, writes tech journalist Thompson (Smarter than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better, 2013), is that a coder has gotten to the problem. “Programmers spend their days trying to get computers to do new things,” he writes, “so they’re often very good at understanding the crazy what-ifs that computers make possible.” Some of those things, of course, have proven noxious: Facebook allows you to keep in touch with high school friends but at the expense of spying on your every online movement. Yet they’re kind of comprehensible, since they’re based on language: Coding problems are problems of words and thoughts and not numbers alone. Thompson looks at some of the stalwarts and heroes of the coding world, many of them not well-known—Ruchi Sanghvi, for example, who worked at Facebook and Dropbox before starting a sort of think tank “aimed at convincing members to pick a truly new, weird area to examine.” If you want weird these days, you get into artificial intelligence, of which the author has a qualified view. Humans may be displaced by machines, but the vaunted singularity probably won’t happen anytime soon. Probably. Thompson is an enthusiast and a learned scholar alike: He reckons that BASIC is one of the great inventions of history, being one of the ways “for teenagers to grasp, in such visceral and palpable ways, the fabric of infinity.” Though big tech is in the ascendant, he writes, there’s a growing number of young programmers who are attuned to the ethical issues surrounding what they do, demanding, for instance, that Microsoft not provide software to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Those coders, writes Thompson, are “the one group of people VCs and CEOs cannot afford to entirely ignore,” making them the heroes of the piece in more ways than one.
Fans of Markoff, Levy, Lanier et al. will want to have a look at this intriguing portrait of coding and coders.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2056-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Another collection of brash, intelligent essays on economics by the author of The Armchair Economist (1993). Landsburg, a columnist for the online magazine Slate, turns his hand to demystifying everyday economics, using his nine-year- old daughter as a sounding board. While his exchanges with Cayley can turn overly sentimental, Landsburg's sharp wit and sharper insight make this a fun read for anyone with a taste for logic and unbiased opinions. Landsburg begins a discussion on NAFTA by debunking the notion that the number of workers who quit their jobs because of pay cuts represents the true cost of foreign competition. It's the workers who stay and take a pay cut, he argues, who are the real losers, because they bear the full brunt of the loss in wages. He later points out that while some would argue that it's unfair to the $16-an-hour worker to lose a job to a $3-an-hour worker, it's actually the public who, from the point of view of pure economics, has been cheated: They've been overpaying for products made by overpriced workers. At times, Landsburg risks sounding like a curmudgeon: He's irritated that Cayley's teachers dictate on the environment, sex, and drugs. But he rightly points out that even the best-intentioned environmental lesson often consists simply of memorizing the number of acres of rainforest lost, rather than a more complex analysis of land use. His best response is saved for Cayley's Hebrew school class: When asked to write an essay that begins ``To be more like God, I will . . .'' students penned treacly lines such as ``I will be kind to animals.'' Landsburg's stinging response: ``I will slay the first born of my enemies.'' Often funny and at times poetic, these essays are eminently readable and always smart. (Radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 8, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-82755-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
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