A small-l libertarian battle cry for a technology that’s truly liberating, just as its pioneers intended.
A meaty manifesto for, among other things, returning the internet to the public domain.
“This is a book for people who want to destroy Big Tech,” writes free-speech advocate and science-fiction writer Doctorow. “It’s not a book for people who want to tame Big Tech. There’s no fixing Big Tech.” Do you hate Facebook? Most people do, notes the author, but we’re on the platform by way of the process of “network effects”—i.e., we are there because our friends are there, and our friends are there because we’re there—and no one wants to be the first to jump off. Still, Doctorow adds, there are ways to fight today’s tech giants. One example comes from Apple, which for years endured a Microsoft Word that was so flawed outside the Windows platform that it lost computer sales to Microsoft by virtue of those same network effects: People who relied on a reliable version of Word for their livelihoods stuck to PCs even if they hated them. The solution: Steve Jobs tasked a group of programmers with reverse-engineering Microsoft Office—figuring out how the program worked from the ground up—and then doing Office one better by creating the software suite originally called iWork, which could open Word documents. The result was that “Microsoft gave up” and turned Office into an open format. Doctorow revisits other stories that were less successful—Napster, for example, which revived long-out-of-print music but was crushed by a litigious recording industry, a success story that should have been but came up against the forces of monopoly and the legal system that makes it possible. Doctorow calls for more reverse-engineering, more “adversarial interoperability,” and more decentralized social media platforms such as Mastodon that, incidentally, are less likely to harbor trolls and Nazis.
A small-l libertarian battle cry for a technology that’s truly liberating, just as its pioneers intended.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781804291245
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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