Erhardt Graeff

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.

View all my reviews on Goodreads

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.

View all my reviews on Goodreads

No More Prisons: Urban Life, Home-Schooling, Hip-Hop Leadership, the Cool Rich Kids Movement, a Hitchhiker’s Guide to Community Organzing, and Why Philanthropy is the Greatest Art Form of the 21st Century! by William Upski Wimsatt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is such an inspiring and reflective follow-up to Wimsatt’s first book, Bomb the Suburbs. The casual tone of the writing makes it a fluid and fast read, but also one that literally speaks to the reader, challenging them to be part of a solution to the ills of society. The author is trying to practice what he preaches and everything about the book is designed to do that. He is forthcoming about why is writing the book and how his thinking has changed since the previous one. You are meant to take the reflection and journey yourself as the reader.

This is a coming of age book in many ways. Wimsatt documents his coming of age as an activist, detailing what he’s learned and how he’s done it. You are encouraged to do the same—not through the same set of experiences necessarily, but your own. This narrative weaves through five themes or areas of activism that he wants to promote and forward. The title refers to the first, which is organizing against the prison industry, and is strategically chosen to dovetail with an album of the same name and a larger movement he wants to see come about called “No More Prisons.” It’s also a metaphor for feeling trapped inside conventions and cycles of social injustice, and through practice and political organizing breaking those trends. He wants us to get involved with issues of Urban life versus Suburban life, Homeschooling/Self-education, Hip-Hop leadership, and Cool Rich Kids and effective philanthropy. We are meant to start organizations around any of these issues, and Wimsatt gives us a rough game plan of how to do it.

My favorite part of the book was his long critique of traditional philanthropy; he lists it’s problems as well as it’s potential and it sounds like he is straight-up describing The Awesome Foundation, which fills me with pride. Read this book and feel empowered.

View all my reviews on Goodreads

Bomb the Suburbs: Graffiti, Race, Freight-Hopping and the Search for Hip Hop’s Moral Center by William Upski Wimsatt

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fascinating walk through the history of Chicago’s hip-hop scene by the simultaneous outsider and insider, Billy Wimsatt. Billy is the White kid who was “down” with all the Black hip-hop pioneers in Chicago and developed into an accomplished Graffiti writer and later organizer. His book is a collection of his published essays on hip-hop, alongside sociological and historical snapshots in the form of personal tours and intimate interviews. It’s a unique book in its construction and fascinating in its subtly growing political agenda. The provocative title is meant to draw you in but also call you to action; Billy wants to start a revolution built on the principles that he sees hip-hop stand for, principles that are about social change and social justice. Fun and inspiring.

View all my reviews on Goodreads