Category: book reviews

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The near future depicted in this book takes some getting used to, like the sexism of Mad Men or the violence of a Tarantino film. And you never feel great about accepting this world for what it is but at least you can enjoy the ride while it lasts after a couple of chapters of desensitization (a theme of the novel itself). Gary Shteyngart appears to have once again written a part of himself into his book as Lenny Abramov, the insecure middle-aged Russian Jew clinging to his vintage clothes and printed books in a Post-Literate world where young people major in “Images” and “Assertiveness” and hope for careers in Retail or Credit—the remaining vocations of prestige in a perfectly service-oriented and paralyzingly indebted to the Chinese America.

This book proposes one extreme vision of where our world might go post-financial crisis, where we live mostly within our Facebook accounts or in scanning through whatever we can buy online on our mobile devices. We are getting dumber and the rich are getting richer. Corporations have merged with sovereign nations to rebrand whole geographies. It’s Shteyngart’s version of Idiocracy. He’s painted a fairly cohesive portrait of this world and commented on a range of issues: cowboy military deployments, superficial media personalities, hyper-sexualization, anti-intellectualism, and the Millennial need to feel like a special flower.

At it’s heart, as the title suggests, is a love story, meditating on family values and responsibility and the complexity of emotions that make us either beautifully authentic or that much more stupid. The novel’s epistolary form augments these intimate aspects. I must admit, I found it pretty absorbing and charming, as well as gross and horrifying, as Shteyngart intended it to be.

Check it out if you enjoy dystopic love stories. Fans of Snow Crash will find some familiar territory here, only with the more cyberpunk action sequences replaced by good ol’ Jewish worry.

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The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn’t Transformed Politics by Micah L. Sifry

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In The Big Disconnect, Micah Sifry provides a clear, concise, and important perspective on how the internet and related technologies have yet to transform the practice of politics in the Unite States. As the editor of techpresident and co-founder/curator of Personal Democracy Forum, he has closely tracked the role of the internet as both a technology and cultural movement through several presidential election cycles and complicated legislative battles in the past 10-15 years.

Sifry takes a stand as an optimist in the potential of the internet to change how we relate to government and participate in making society better, but it is clear that he is a deeply disappointed optimist. His main gripes stem from how the ability to connect people and scale actions online have largely led to disempowerment of average citizens by strengthening broadcast forms of communication and organization rather than nonhierarchial, peer-to-peer, and other more participatory forms. The two expressions of this he puts under the headings “Big Data” and “Big Email.”

In Big Data, Sifry discusses how political campaigns have taken the model of polling and audience research to a point where voters are entirely abstract concepts, represented by numbers slotted into certain buckets that either help or hurt the campaign. Using this data, contemporary campaigns can pinpoint very precise demographics for television and internet advertising, and who needs more personal contact with staffers and volunteers via door-knocks and phone calls. This kind of communication and management pervades all levels of political campaigns as well—it determines what staff and volunteers should do and where they should go. Messaging is fine tuned from the top in a way that undermines local staffers ability to develop meaningful relationships with constituents. While we elevate Obama’s 2008 campaign for its community organizing spirit and spontaneous and ad-hoc manners of support and activation, Sifry argues that the real value created according to campaign managers during that cycle was a more effective voter list and the data science tools used to mine it and set strategy from the top. This is what is driving subsequent campaigns and disconnecting politicians from voters rather than involving them in the campaigns in any real way. Big donors are the only ones left with that kind of personal touch and influence.

In Big Email, Sifry looks at how this data-driven approach to political organizing of campaigns and advocacy organizations like MoveOn is based on clever and massive use of email. Email replaces the postcards of old in alerting supporters and organizational members of key issues, actions, and calls for donation. MoveOn certainly transformed how email is used for political advocacy but Sifry believes it hasn’t changed how politics is practiced. A few staffers at the head of such organizations control the email list and send all the emails. They may poll their members for input on issues and direction either explicitly via survey or implicitly via tracking email opens and clicks. However, their experiments in greater participation in decisions and activities have been one-offs, while the convenient one-to-many behemoth that is email has remained the main mode of interaction. Despite the fact that email efficacy is dwindling, as response rates go down, the groups that are large enough—in the hundreds of thousands and millions of subscriber-members—can maintain themselves with the tiny fraction that respond.

Sifry doesn’t see this as sustainable or desirable. In the latter part of the book, he explores a couple of projects he hopes will change the nature of internet-empowered political participation. He offers a detailed and insightful case study of New Haven-based SeeClickFix, a company that has created an easy way for citizens to participate in everyday governance of their city—reporting potholes, stray dogs, and other such problems in a way that makes it easily usable by appropriate government departments and trackable. Moreover at the scale SeeClickFix has been adopted in its native city, it creates a backchannel for citizens to discuss the performance of the government and see the gestalt of what problems plague the city. Sifry also introduces Loomio, a consensus-building tool, that is trying to support and scale the kinds of decision-making that the Occupy Movement employed and popularized—giving participants a more equal opportunity to be involved in political processes.

The Big Disconnect ends on a bit of a curveball. Sifry reflects on the state of transparency and whistleblowing in light of the Snowden NSA revelations. He tries to connect this to the larger question of how internet’s culture of openness may or may not be changing political practice through taking and supporting such actions. While this additional meditation connects well to Sifry’s other work, particularly his previous book on Wikileaks, it feels disjointed from the throughlines of the rest of the book and deserves a longer treatment elsewhere or a shorter tighter integration into the book’s main argument.

You should read this book if you study or build civic technology like I do. I must caveat that I know Micah personally and thus am more likely to read and review it as a result. I am also more familiar with the backstory of his thinking, which may bias my opinion of the book. Still, it’s a good, quick read, and should be considered if you are thinking about what it might take to really transform the practice of politics in the information/internet/network/digital age.

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Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a quick-reading tale about trying to fight the High Frequency Trader (HFT) powers that be, which have succeeded in doing the seemingly impossible: made Wall Street more unfair. If you’ve seen Kevin Slavin’s TED talk on how algorithms literally shape our world (http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin…), then you know part of the story already. Where Michael Lewis takes it is a thorough play-by-play history of how IEX (Investory’s Exchange) set about creating a stock exchange that controlled for the speed advantage that HFT have to re-empower investors to make trades when and how they wanted to without being outrun and priced up by HFT. It’s a story of personalities, brusque Wall Street types and technologists, who are tried of people getting screwed by the new system.

It’s a pretty eye-opening read with regard to how Wall Street now works. I was thoroughly disillusioned as someone counting on the stock market to help finance my retirement. I couldn’t believe how many ways there were of extracting value from my money, without creating any actual value, that were built into the system. This form of capitalism as actually anti-capitalistic; it’s perverse. What was even more gobsmacking was the story of Serge Aleynikov. A programmer who ends up convicted of corporate espionage for saving open source code repositories that he worked with while at Goldman Sachs. For anyone connected to the open source software community, the story of how Goldman Sachs regularly strips off the open source licenses of code that they add to their own codebase and then refuse to let programmers contribute back to the OSS projects modifications or even save any of that code themselves is horrendous.

If you take away one thing, it’s that Wall Street might be the most paranoid and cutthroat corporate environment to work in. The money is attractive but the culture is hostile; it’s a miracle that IEX was created in the first place, let alone still exists! Michael Lewis does an amazing job of keeping the pages turning quickly with lots of dialogue from a cast of colorful characters. Definitely a fun and informative and depressing read.

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Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I could read biographies like this all day long, everyday. And I certainly tried to do that with James Gleick’s Genius. It’s not just that it’s written well and thoroughly researched with great details, anecdotes, and quotes. It’s that the character at the center—Richard Feynman—is so compelling. As Gleick shows, Feynman worked hard to make himself into the iconoclastically interesting person he was. He held on to his roots as a bit of a bumpkin, growing up just beyond the edges of New York City. He hated most music but loved rhythm and became an accomplished bongos player. And as a scientist, he refused to follow anything that looked “fashionable.” I loved the quotes from Feynman where he states his role as a scientist isn’t to explain how other physicists solved a problem, it was to go and actually solve problems. He claimed to only read contemporary journal articles in physics so far as he could understand the problem, then he would go off and try to solve it himself using his own methods.

Gleick attempts to draw out larger lessons in the book about the nature of genius and creativity. This was the only disjointed part of the book I thought. The sub-chapter on genius seems like a standalone essay dropped in to justify the title of the book or to reuse material to fill out the biography. That said, one of the key reflections on Feynman’s approach, supported by accounts from his peers, was his willful ignorance of scholarship in his field at multiple points in his career. He seemed to actively avoid it, and through that naiveté perhaps cultivate the opportunity for original thought. This is a pretty profound insight, especially to an academic like me who is expected to know the field as part of the job. But knowing too much can be a recipe for stagnation as everything appears to have been solved or understood already, or new problems simply require someone else’s method rather than a novel one. I’m going to be thinking about this idea for a long time.

This biography does a great job of offering context from the era of physics and especially the role of the Manhattan Project, which really changed the course of science and the careers of Feynman and his contemporaries. Gleick offers mini-biographies of many of these contemporaries who most closely worked and/or competed with Feynman on the central discoveries of quantum physics: notably Julian Schwinger and Murray Gell-Mann. And letters and interviews fill out how his peers saw him and how he engaged with his mentors, which I always find fascinating. With the end of this book, I’m hungry for more historical and biographical texts of this calibre, and will probably need to pick up Gleick’s earlier work: Chaos.

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The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This classic holds up astonishingly well after 53 years. Jane Jacobs identifies or predicts problems that continue to affect cities like San Francisco, LA, Philadelphia, and most notably Detroit. The contributions here are historical, sociological, and theoretical. It’s great to see how much of her sentiment, spirit, and insight are now a part of city planning, but we miss larger lessons still about the level of complexity and the need for greater interdepartmental and interdisciplinary collaboration to handle the unique problems cities pose.

Smart Cities are meant to be one answer to this, but they quickly fall afoul of Jacobs’ concerns about the then new approaches to cities looking for averages from data on population, geography, income, etc. These are important for planning but don’t handle complexity around residents’ behavior, especially behaviors hard to quantify at all. Reading this in association with Jan Gehl’s How to Study Public Life, which was directly inspired by Jacobs’ insights, was really helpful and recommended to others.

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