A mixed bag, more successful as historical description than cultural criticism.
Will technology liberate us, or further enslave us? That’s the big question underlying this treatise on machines and their discontents.
British economist Skidelsky begins by revisiting John Maynard Keynes’ prognostication that our smart machinery would free us to work only three hours or so a day—then noting that, alas, it hasn’t worked out that way. In a rather scattershot look at how we’ve failed to free ourselves, Skidelsky serves up Marx, Mumford, and Marcuse, along with Toynbee, St. Augustine, Arendt, et al. Sometimes he sounds exactly the right note, as when he identifies the unfortunate Greek inventor Icarus as the poster boy for hubris, “the attempt by humans to usurp the place of the gods in the scheme of life.” He is less convincing when he evokes pop culture, as when he calls Elon Musk “the Mad Max of the AI world.” (Mad Max was the good guy. If anything, Musk would probably self-identify as The Humungus.) Skidelsky rightly praises interdisciplinarity, but he’s at his best, if sometimes didactically so, when in his home fields of economics and history. On that ground, he writes interestingly of how Britain developed so rapidly as a tech nation because of both its non-predatory government (at least when not out gobbling up nations to build its empire) and its emphasis on property rights. He is less successful when on Jaron Lanier’s turf: the briar patches of AI and the philosophical implications of evolving machines. He may be too indulgent about the 1960s’ counterculture’s promise of the “transformation of human nature through sexual liberation,” though in closing the same sentence he hits on a hard truth: “Escape from the burden of work is open only to a tiny minority.” There’s good material here, but it takes burdensome work to get to it.
A mixed bag, more successful as historical description than cultural criticism.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781590517970
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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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