Author: Erhardt Graeff

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by Gabriella Coleman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A carefully argued book written by a savvy anthropologist. The main thrust of the book is the assertion that free software hackers or programmers practice a unique form of liberal politics through their “free” labor in creating a common or public good in the form of free software (she focuses on the Debian operating system), and in stewarding the legal freedom that users and contributors enjoy by using such software. Biella argues that several aspects of this technical and philosophical or ethical work lead to its success and have changed the way people think of intellectual property and public goods in other fields.

Biella does a great job of taking the reader through a history of free software and into the lives of free software programmers/hackers through their IRC chats, code snippets, jokes, and personal histories. As far as ethnography goes, this is a very accessible read. There is still a lot of jargon, both social scientific jargon and technical jargon, but the writing is clear. Her choice to use in-line parenthetical citations also helps to flag jargon that is meant to speak to a specific academic audience, letting the lay reader off the hook a bit.

It’s definitely a must-read for students of intellectual property law, software history, digital culture, and media activism

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The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network by Katherine Losse

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is Katherine Losse’s memoir about working at Facebook. It’s a fascinating look into the personal politics and ideologies of Facebook and Silicon Valley. She is employee 51 at the company, working in customer service after seeking a change of pace following her disenchantment with the PhD in English she was pursuing. She works her way up, playing the game and buying into the mission, and eventually tops out as Mark Zuckerberg’s ghost writer. Zuck, Sheryl Sandberg, Dustin Moskovitz all show up in the text and we get windows into their personalities. It’s the author’s detailed notes on these individuals and the growth of the company internally which serves as the key contribution of the book.

Unfortunately, the writing is a bit awkward. The personal anecdotes, glimpses of love, and social outings are all documented through the lens of how Facebook is changing how we relate, emote, and think. Her reflections and philosophizing get repetitive. I don’t think her observations are necessarily inaccurate but they feel belabored in the book. She also feels compelled to explain a lot of internet culture and hacker jargon, which interrupts the flow of the story. In the end, I enjoyed the story but feel like it could have used a heavier hand in editing as it tries to be both a memoir and an ethnography, and feels a bit off center as a result.

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Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The first half of Lanier’s book is a strong critique of the current trend in computing and business toward aggregation and exploitation of consumer data. He calls companies like Facebook and Google, as well as financial companies that make rapid trades and find loopholes in the markets algorithmically, “Siren Servers.” This is a helpful concept and framing of the problem. Lanier then looks to a future dominated by Siren Servers while technological innovation continues to make humans less relevant and valuable except as inputs to algorithms. This is a dystopic picture, and he calls it science fiction upfront. But, it’s to make a point. He wants to preserve human dignity, psychologically as well as economically.

Lanier’s worried about the loss of the middle class and how that will means not only bad economics but a loss of creativity, when we can no longer support, musicians, writers, or even coders outside of the context of Siren Server optimization. Lanier’s alternative future is defined by what he calls a humanistic information economy. This economy is built on a technological infrastructure in which anything that is created is personally and perpetually connected to its creator. A universal marketplace system allows creators to be paid royalties whenever their creation is used. This is not just physical and intellectual property, but also our clicks and other data exhaust that feed the algorithms powering Siren Servers. We would be compensated for all this interaction, and this would provide both economic and political leverage that might offset plutocratic tendencies. It’s worth a think.

Who Owns the Future? probably could have been a shorter and tighter book. Lanier includes text that most writers would footnote, and then has footnotes that most writers would never dream of including at all. The book also has a series of interludes that expand on certain ideas or work through non sequiturs that may help some readers understand how Lanier arrived at his concerns and ideas but otherwise are extraneous. In the end, it’s hard to swallow his diagnosis and remedy for the world, but it’s an important topic that should be considered by other technologists, as well as economists and policymakers. There are trends in our economics and information-driven spaces that demand creative responses. Here’s one.

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