An impressive work of research and intellectual reflection.
Lalka conducts a searching exploration of the entrepreneurs who ushered in the digital age—and the moral implications of their innovations—in this nonfiction work.
The author discusses how, in 2003, when Mark Zuckerberg started Facemash in his dorm room as a sophomore at Harvard, all the signs of Zuckerberg’s questionable moral compass were on display, including his disregard for the law and the privacy of others, a “disrespect for the dignity of each real person because it was just online,” and a profound insensitivity to the emotional injury caused by the site’s scathing judgments. Lalka goes on to describe how Zuckerberg would bring this mindset to Facebook and deliberately exploit the addiction to judgment and divisiveness social media generates while failing to sufficiently address the platform’s impact on vulnerable children. Contrastingly, Sergey Brin and Larry Page conceived of Google as an “anticorporate effort” that would make the Internet freer and more transparent—a grand project of democratization. However, per the author, they eventually betrayed these noble aspirations building a corporate monopoly that harvests the private data of its users to profit from their manipulation. In this provocatively thoughtful book, Lalka, who runs the entrepreneurship and innovation center at Tulane’s business school, questions why we trusted such figures with so much disruptive power. “Why did we assume that entrepreneurs, investors, and politicians wouldn’t serve themselves, even if it meant going against the very democratic principles that gave them opportunities, fueled their successes, or even enabled them to exist in business and society?”
Lalka covers a dizzying expanse of the Internet’s explosive growth and includes incisive profiles of controversial luminaries like Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and Travis Kalanick. At times, his presentation can seem a touch meandering and digressively ill-disciplined—he certainly casts a net so wide that his study risks devolving into a scattershot work with more breadth than depth. However, the cacophony of competing narratives ultimately congeals into a coherent whole focusing on the moral perils of the Internet’s expansion and cultural dominance. Of course, the Internet has provided an unprecedented access to knowledge, as well as heretofore unimaginable social connectedness, but it has also, per Lalka, eliminated jobs, subverted democratic and legal processes, and stoked all manner of cultural decline. One might suggest, as the author boldly does, that, in a meaningful sense, we are all now less free: “So maybe it isn’t an overstatement to say that your freedom to decide is lost in this equation. Your power over your data certainly is. There’s a reason so many tech companies have made so much money with this business model. They don’t have to pay you anything for the data they’re mining and all the value they’re gaining from your attention and experiences.” Lalka’s analysis is remarkably unflinching, calling to account these icons who are, after all, mere entrepreneurs, “never heroes fulfilling a sacred destiny.” The body of work addressing this subject now seems inexhaustible, but this book must count as among its most clear-eyed, well researched, and morally uncompromising examples.
An impressive work of research and intellectual reflection.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9780231210263
Page Count: 496
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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