Category: book reviews

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Why did I wait so long to read this book? Fortunately, it holds up well, even in the places where it explains computer lingo—a flaw of many other novels from that era. I was worried when I opened the first page that I wouldn’t be able to keep up. There is a pace to the writing which is nosebleed-inducing at the onset. But once you commit, it feels more like what you would expect from a good thriller.

But let’s talk about the world Stephenson creates/portends. My favorite neologism in the book is “loglo,” which represents the blinding spectacle of light radiating from towering electric roadside signage in every direction. These advertise franchulates, which represent customer service points for franchised corporates that are now sovereign territories as well. Much of the United States government has been privatized. Most notably the Library of Congress and the NSA/CIA have merged and corporatized into the CIC, which employs people as stringers to vacuum up intel for its repository. Stringers make royalties off the intel they collect through the sublime melding of sousveillance and surveillance—it’s libertarian without being liberating. The evolved form of this practice is realized in “gargoyles,” which are essentially stringers with wearable computers and augmented reality googles not unlike Google Glass. Here we come!

The Metaverse is a virtual world, roughly like what Second Life aspired to be, gargoyles are plugged into both simultaneously. Those that have the means—largely “hackers”—have avatars in this world and conduct business here, but it’s only accessible to those with the means of technical chops, finances, and infrastructure to connect and participate. Only a small fraction of the world’s population enjoys the benefits that come from being part of the technological priesthood that “inhabit” the Metaverse. The Third World is largely untouched and referred to as a kind of distant other. There is no mobile computing revolution yet for them—then again it appears that a good bit of East Asia has collapsed—so who knows what happened.

This was too much fun to read, and heartily recommended to the few souls like myself who have not picked it up yet. It was originally meant to be a graphic novel, but even as simply a novel it’s a very engrossing and imagery-rich work, full of creativity and intelligence.

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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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Please Don’t Bomb the Suburbs: A Midterm Report on My Generation and the Future of Our Super Movement by William Upski Wimsatt

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Like much of Billy’s writing this book is written like a polished set of diary entries and calls to action. His style is casual, impassioned, and engaging, though at times borders on frenetic and cheerlead-y. Hard to blame him as he is trying to convey a sense of urgency to motivate readers to take action on impending catastrophes in our environment and the economy.

The larger arc of the book is about movement building, but it is also a very personal book—in some ways more personal than Billy’s earlier books Bomb the Suburbs and No More Prisons. In those earlier works, he collects his thoughts and experiences on hip-hop culture and youth organizing around issues like the prison-industrial complex. In Please Don’t Bomb the Suburbs, Billy reflects on his life to that point. He tries to put in perspective everything he’s done, everyone he’s met, and the series of transformations his identity and character has gone through during twenty years of engagement in youth culture and politics. In his own words the book is about “growing up”—for him as a member of the hip-hop generation and for progressive politics as a movement.

His goal is nothing less than to save the world: the pillars of his envisioned progressive super movement are love, survival, and prosperity. And the book is an invitation to reflect on yourself, to think about what you could or should be doing, and to join the movement.

The book has four major threads, in Billy’s words: my stories, movement stories, life strategies, and movement strategies. I really appreciate that he pauses to reflect on the last two. He emphasizes how personal well-being is itself a radical political act in that it serves to strengthen and rejuvenate us to do the important work he outlines. If we expect everyone to work til we drop and we compare ourselves against that ideal we are undermining the movement. He then goes into some straightforward advice on how to run nonprofit and social justice organizations. From the executive director perspective he questions the assumption that the most effective managerial styles are collective, and argues that hierarchy is how you stay truly accountable to your mission and goals, especially when you are managing large organizations. He also encourages EDs to take leadership training and coaching seriously and to form support groups with other EDs in order to collectively vent and share best practices.

Lastly, Billy addresses race and diversity throughout the book. And particularly apropos of the 2014 Michael Brown and Eric Garner protests going on while I read this book, he offers great advice on how to be an advocate and ally in a way that respects race without making everything about race.

Please Don’t Bomb the Suburbs would make a great gift for on-the-fence college students that need a sense of what’s possible to spur them into action. And I’m really curious about how successful Billy thinks the book has been since publication in 2010.

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