An eminently readable cautionary tale about technology that once again questions what—or who—the product really is.
The story of the supercharged rise and inevitable distortion of one of the world’s most wide-ranging and influential social media platforms.
As a technology reporter for Bloomberg News, Frier has covered social media for years, so she is well positioned to chronicle the founding and subsequent evolution of Instagram, the ubiquitous photo- and video-sharing service. Long before the site became the darling of celebrities and socialites (e.g. Paris Hilton), the invention was the brainchild of Stanford graduates Kevin Systrom, who parlayed his personal interest in photography into an early version of the app called Burbn, and levelheaded engineer Mike Krieger. Readers looking for the power dynamics and interpersonal drama that fuel many Silicon Valley sagas will find them here, though Frier’s compelling narrative style is more journalistic than soapy. Still, the book does contain friction, notably between Instagram and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who purchased it in 2012 for $1 billion, as well as the long-simmering feud between Zuckerberg and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. The cast of characters is daunting, but it’s rewarding to see the platform’s innovations emerge, largely driven by the passion of its internal evangelists. It’s also disappointing—but not necessarily surprising given revelations about Facebook in recent years—to watch as Instagram employees fail to receive their expected rewards from the acquisition. Facebook slowly but purposefully turned a creation aimed at social artistry and communality into yet another advertising platform with the secondary purpose of funneling users toward the mothership. The author entertainingly portrays the clash between company values as well as the rise of Instagram’s bizarre celebrity culture, with cameos from the likes of Ashton Kutcher and Kim Kardashian West (who receives “about $1 million for a single post”)—not to mention the horde eventually known as “influencers.”
An eminently readable cautionary tale about technology that once again questions what—or who—the product really is.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2680-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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