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
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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A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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