Wired editor at large and longtime tech reporter Levy (In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, 2011, etc.) explores the inner workings of the social media giant.
While attending Harvard, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg “took a laissez-faire attitude toward classes” while deep within projects such as Course Match, which allowed students to see who was signed up for which classes—good for those seeking candidates for a winning study group, one might say, but also a fine tool for a stalker. Levy explores the morally neutral world that Zuckerberg built with Facebook, an enterprise whose every technological feature disguises means to gather salable data on the user’s movements, preferences, political leanings, and the like. Those features, of course, have put Facebook very much in the news as a vehicle for delivering “fake news.” As one advertising executive noted, looking at the growth of “ruble-denominated accounts” surrounding the 2016 presidential election, “it was one hundred percent knowable that [the Russians] would use social media in this way.” Defending himself in the wake of the massive data mining undertaken by companies such as Cambridge Analytica, Zuckerberg has retreated behind the shield of free expression, though belatedly acknowledging that consumers might not want their private data to be so easily accessed. “For the past twelve years,” writes Levy of the choice between more or less privacy, “Zuckerberg had been ranking those values incorrectly.” For all his criticisms, the author, who enjoyed free access to Zuckerberg, is less dismissive of Facebook and its intentions than Roger McNamee, whose book Zucked (2019) condemns the company’s demonstrated disregard for its users’ rights. If changes for the better come, they’ll likely be grudging. Levy makes it clear that Zuckerberg believes in the essential benefit to the world of his mission even if he is “the man who some think has done as much destruction to that world as anyone in the business realm.”
Of considerable interest to followers of technological trends, futurists, and investors.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1315-9
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BUSINESS | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS
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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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