Book: thumbs-up. Subject: frown emoji.
An insider’s account of some very bad goings-on at Facebook/Meta.
Former New Zealand diplomat Wynn-Williams talked her way into an ambassadorial job of sorts at Facebook on the grounds that it was likely to become a political giant. She landed in 2011, thinking that the politics she had in mind would be for the good and that part of her job would be to keep the tech behemoth independent: “Information is power. At some point, governments would want to control it.” Warning signs otherwise were there from the start: An outwardly apolitical Mark Zuckerberg decides that he wants to be seated next to Raúl Castro at a state dinner. (He flees when rebuffed by not just the Cuban leader but by Canada’s prime minister.) A German delegation in turn is spurned when it asks for content mediation to curb hate speech: “We failed when it mattered,” Wynn-Williams writes. “With the country we most needed to win over.” Small wonder, she adds, that Germany opened an investigation on Facebook, which, jumping ahead in her narrative, explains why a company board member proposed courting far-right actors such as MAGA and Germany’s AfD—the thought being that less oversight over those who cozy up to them means more profit. China is the grand curiosity: “The mission of the company—making the world more open and connected—is the exact opposite of what the Chinese Communist Party wants, particularly under President Xi Jinping,” she writes at a time when the company is going hammer and tongs for market there. And now, the author says, Facebook is “dangling the possibility that it’ll give China special access to users’ data.” Among all this intrigue, Wynn-Williams’ accusation of some spectacularly louche and horndoggish behavior among the top brass seems an afterthought, but that gossipy element is there, giving a human touch to “these people and their lethal carelessness.”
Book: thumbs-up. Subject: frown emoji.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781250391230
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
IN THE NEWS
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
