Book Review: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (2025). Cory Doctorow.

The title of this book, "Enshittification", became a meme on the Internet shortly after the book was released, and ended up on lists of most popular new words of 2025. It is certainly attention-grabbing, and clearly means something unflattering, but what exactly did the author mean by his provocative new term? Once I’d heard the new word a few times, I decided it was probably time to go read the book and find out. 

It turned out to be not just a general complaint about the state of the world, and the social and historical trend lines we’re on. Instead, Doctorow has devised a conceptual framework for understanding the rise and decline of many of the Information Age’s great product lines and major tech companies.

What most of us have seen as just a series of unfortunate individual management decisions and developments affecting products and brands we once loved, Doctorow describes as a deliberate, repeatable business plan and process which has been adopted by all the iconic tech companies of our age.

The process of “enshittification” as the author describes it begins with the original stage, in which a start-up with a brilliant new innovacation, and flush with venture capital cash, creates a golden age for the new users of their product. Something incredibly useful, original and attractive is handed out to any and all willing adopters for free or for a nominal price. The word spreads, and a large user base for the product and services is built. The users love the product, and keep spreading the word as it becomes more and more ubiquitous and indispensable to the users, and then to society as a whole.

The second stage of enshittification represents a transition to the golden age for secondary businesses lining up to exploit the vast new captive audience for the original product or service. That exploitation can come in the form of advertising, selling compatible and complementary tools, and companies selling their products directly to the users by leveraging services and marketplaces provided through the central product company.

Suddenly many other businesses eager to mine the gold represented by the product’s huge customer base align with or embed with the central product company, using powerful and easy to use business tools the central product company provides.

New fortunes are made by these outside businesses, while the original value to the user and enjoyment of the product begins to diminish. Nevertheless, no one wants to leave the party yet, in large part due to the network effect – the individual costs and inconvenience to the user of disassociating from a service or community where everyone else they know is still present and participating.

The third stage is the dissolution stage, the end stage of enshittification. At this point, the product company at the center of the tech and business environment built around their products now begins exploiting everyone.

At this stage, they will try to extract maximum value from their users, by adding devious licensing restrictions, rapid planned obsolescence, forced upgrades, selling users’ private data and a host of other hateful policies. At the same time, they will also take increasing advantage of their business partners’ reliance upon their large customer network to charge exorbitant commissions on partners’ revenues, adopt new policies favoring their own business interests over the business partners and other monopolistic and unconscionable tactics. 

The end result for the once enthusiastic users of these products and services is anger, frustration, disillusionment and a feeling of being ripped off. But it’s hard to let go, because of the convenience of the product, the years invested in learning how to use it, sometimes peoples’ identification with the product itself and its community, and the ease of interoperating with others because everyone else you know uses it too.

The end result for the once enthusiastic associated business is also anger, frustration, disillusionment and the feeling of being ripped off. But in their cases, these dependent companies have often increasingly built their entire business plans, their daily operations and their customer relationship management with an utter reliance upon the central product company’s customer base and support services, so escaping from the relationship is inherently threatening to their company’s very survival. Indeed, in many cases competing outside the world of the central product or service provider may be economically impossible by this point.

The author explains this basic theory and how it works in considerably more detail, but he also provides many specific case studies and examples to demonstrate how this process has played out with most of the major corporate players of the tech world, especially Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft. It is all interesting, and often even entertaining reading.

Many of the details will be instantly familiar to all of us from news reports, or from our own interactions with these companies as consumers and customers. What’s new and startling is not the dirty tactics and outrageous practices themselves, but seeing them in the larger context of this repeatable and predictable process of enshittification which Doctorow describes.

This is a terrific book for understanding why so much of the tech we all use and depend upon has become so constantly infuriating and frustrating, at the same time it’s given us so many marvelous tools we need and love to use. Doctorow also has some proposals for what it would take to try to break these cycles, and take us forward to a world of tech not controlled by the monopolistic companies that now rule our digital lives, although whether these ideas can still be effective remains to be seen.

Enshittification is one of the most important books of the past several years for understanding our modern digital economy, and how the internet and digital tools we thought only a few years ago might be means for advancing freedom and human connection have so quickly devolved instead into such a disturbing and dangerous hot mess. The oncoming onslaught of AI in the mix only makes it more important to try to understand how the large tech companies operate, the monopolistic tactics they use and their ultimate self-serving goals in developing their new products. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Chasing Shadows: Cyber Espionage, Subversion and the Global Fight for Democracy (2025). Ronald J. Diebert.

I previously reviewed a book called Pegasus (2023), by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud. It recounted the investigation by a small group of journalists and internet researchers into the now-notorious Pegasus software, which allows the operator to covertly take control of smartphones, download all their private data, and turn them into remote microphones, GPS trackers and cameras in a target’s pocket.

The Pegasus spyware app had been created by an Israeli cybersecurity firm called NSO as a tool to allow governments to spy on citizens, allegedly only to be sold to “good” governments trying to crack down on international terrorism and crime.

But in Pegasus, the authors exposed how NSO regularly violated their own stated policy of only selling to friendly democratic governments, and also sold the software tools to repressive regimes around the globe, who used it to terrorize political dissidents and opposition figures. The authors’ findings, and the dangerous process of uncovering the truth of NSO’s cyber-spying exploits, were the key ingredients of their story.

Chasing Shadows is a related book, by the founder and director of an organization in Canada called the Citizen Lab, which played an important role in the Pegasus investigation. It is to a limited degree an autobiography of the author, Ronald Diebert, and his role in launching this non-profit organization dedicated to exposing the dark secrets of authoritarian governments, and their rulers, who use the internet and cyber tools to spy on and control their adversaries.

But it is also an up to the minute, true-life spy thriller, full of case studies, dangerous situations, and exploits of the small but committed circles of journalists and tech savants at the Citizen Lab and around the world. It is the story of these few brave investigators, who try to coordinate, share resources, and work together to expose and disrupt authoritarian governments and their operatives, along with the dark cybersecurity companies like NSO that enable their dirty deeds. And it is also the story of some of the victims, and what they experienced as a result of the spyware attacks on their phones.

It's discouraging to read this, and realize the power and technological capabilities of the cyber surveillance tools that are now available to dictators and criminals to control others, and attempt to destroy their opposition.

But it’s encouraging and inspiring to realize that there are people who have accepted it as their life’s mission to investigate, expose and undermine these bad actors when they attempt to use these powerful spying tools against their adversaries. It’s also impressive how skillful these investigators, journalists and tech wizards have become in tracking and exposing the sales and use of these malicious tools, even with their limited resources, and the constant danger to themselves as well as the targets of malevolent surveillance.

You won’t sleep easier after reading Chasing Shadows, but it’s important to be aware of the current situation, and the nature of the high-tech surveillance threats we now face from the smartphones most of us carry with us all day. Recommended. 

Book Review: Nuclear War: A Scenario (2024). Annie Jacobsen.

Hello, friends and readers,

As I mentioned in a recent post, this year I’m planning to continue writing about more books, movies, TV and other topics, but hope to make the articles a lot shorter.

I know from my own Substack subscriptions that I am drowning in too much content from too many smart and interesting people. No doubt many of you are too. What’s most important is that I share my recommendations about content I found worthwhile, rather than trying to summarize and analyze the whole story every time. So let’s get started!

This book, Nuclear War, is not technically non-fiction, in the sense that the story it tells hasn't happened – at least not yet. The author, Annie Jacobsen, is an award-winning reporter who has written a number of acclaimed non-fiction books about different aspects of the U.S. defense and intelligence communities. But in this case she uses a chilling fictional scenario of a single unidentified incoming ICBM missile to illustrate in great (and extensively researched) detail the systemic problems in our nuclear war command and control mechanisms, flaws which would almost certainly lead to a global war of human annihilation in the case of even a single missile launch or nuclear attack against the United States or its allies.  

 In 2025, almost exactly the same scenario was used as the basis for the movie A House of Dynamite, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, a very well-made thriller that reached the same conclusions. Curiously, few reviewers seem to have made the connection between Jacobsen's book and the movie, and I don’t know to what extent the director may have been aware of the book, or the author of the impending movie. But the book and the movie do seem very similar in plot and outcome.

Jacobsen asserts that nuclear war defense strategies against even a single missile or nuclear attack have been exhaustively war-gamed by the Pentagon, as well as by the other major nuclear powers, and always end with the same result – the end of human civilization within a period of minutes or hours. Even a sociopathic fascist leader like Vladimir Putin knows this, which is why his numerous threats to use his nuclear arsenal against Ukraine and the West have ultimately rung hollow. Which does raise a powerful question about why we continue to build and maintain these vast arsenals of planet-destroying weapons, and keep them at a hair-trigger state of readiness. 

This is a deeply disturbing but well-researched case for nuclear disarmament, made palpable by showing how the individual humans with their hands on the triggers, in a situation requiring almost instantaneous decision-making, would be ill-equipped and unable to overcome the built-in institutional assumptions and biases toward immediate escalation that are inherent in Cold War era deterrence theory and strategies.

It’s unfortunate that we’re unlikely to make much progress on this ongoing threat to humanity in the current global and national political climate. Highly recommended. 

Personal Note: My Latest Single, I'm Your Man, Released Today!

Hello, Friends! 

I'm writing to announce that my new song and lyric video, "I'm Your Man", was released today.

I must admit I feel conflicted, posting about my fun creative projects right now, given the terrible mess in our country. The daily onslaught of news of chaos, violence and the brutality of the current regime and ICE/CBP, and the plight of all of us, especially those most immediately affected by the federal government's terror tactics, is never far from my mind.

Nevertheless, I finished this song, and it's an upbeat one, about romantic relationships and the joy they bring to our everyday lives. I never wanted to specialize in protest songs, though State of Anxiety, Shots Fired and Unknown Land are certainly in that tradition, and as artists we sometimes have to respond to the times and conditions in which we live. 

 

During these trying moments, though, I also believe it's vital to treasure the human connections and love that comfort and delight us, and to draw strength from them. So I hope you like it. You can listen to it on my YouTube channel (click on the link on the right column of this site), or on any music streaming service.

 

One other thing I wanted to mention. Most of my songs tend to sound how I imagine them, but occasionally I do one where there's an artist or band providing inspiration for the instrumentation, the arrangement and vocals, the "look and feel" of the song. 

 

Those few songs are still all originals, but at least for me and those of us who made them, there was a particular artist or band that influenced the song's sound, and the way we envisioned it as we worked on the recording. 

 

"I'm Your Man" is one of those songs, which made it ironic and sad that we completed production on the weekend Bob Weir, legendary guitarist, singer and songwriter for the Grateful Dead, passed away at age 78.

 

So this one's for Bob, and all his Grateful Dead bandmates, most of them gone now. I hope it recaptures a little of the joyful spirit and the unique sound they created together, and pays appropriate respect and homage from this lifelong fan to the band, and its members' extraordinary musical careers and life journeys.

 

Special thanks to Matt Taylor at Echo Lake Studios for co-producing this song with me, to Tim Delaney on bass for 'getting his Phil Lesh on' so brilliantly, and to Rich Rowlinson for his beautiful and vibrant piano part.

Book Review: Heartbreaker: A Memoir (2025). Mike Campbell with Ari Surdoval.

Hello, friends! After a busy holiday season, I’m posting a review I’ve had sitting around, almost ready, for several weeks. It’s an entertainment-related review, as a relief from the endlessly distressing news cycle. Hope you enjoy it!

By the way, I’ve been thinking about my new year’s resolutions for The Memory Cache, and have decided to try to make it more readable and more engaging by aiming for more regular posts, but with fewer words. Somehow over the past few years, my posts have grown longer and longer, and even to me perhaps overly detailed. So look for shorter articles, more often, in the new year.

In my review of the documentary The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal a couple of months ago, I mentioned that I had read a couple of great rock biographies recently. I’m finally getting around to writing about one of them – Heartbreaker by Mike Campbell.

A few years ago, I read and reviewed Steve Van Zandt’s autobiography Unrequited Infatuations, which is probably the closest parallel story to Mike Campbell’s that you could imagine from the whole history of rock and roll. For both Van Zandt and Campbell, they were the primary sideman at the right hand of one of the great legends of American rock music. For Van Zandt, the legendary band leader, song writer, guitarist and singer was Bruce Springsteen; for Mike Campbell, it was Tom Petty.

Both of them were founding members of their respective bands, close friends with their superstar band leaders, and trusted advisers, co-producers, and song-writing collaborators. But their stories, their backgrounds, their personalities, and their own unique talents and contributions were also very different, which makes Mike Campbell’s book a new and rewarding addition to the slender shelf of “rock star sideman” autobiographies.

In fact, Heartbreaker is notable not just as Campbell’s account of his life and career, and his role as lead guitarist and chief sideman for Tom Petty, but because it is the first “insider” autobiographical account of the band’s entire history from one of the members.

Tom Petty and various band members participated through interviews in the excellent Warren Zanes biography Petty, and Petty and the band members also cooperated with Peter Bogdanovich in the film  documentary Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Between those two works, and other published stories and anecdotes, many of the major events, trials, tribulations and successes in Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker’s long and storied history have been well documented. Yet we’ve never before read a full, reflective personal  account from one of the members of how the band began, how it all went down, and what came next after Tom Petty’s unexpected death in 2017.

I should say as fair warning that this book might not be for everyone. I’m a long-time enthusiastic fan of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and of Mike Campbell in his own right, so the level of detail he includes (for example) about the minutiae of equipment he owned, played and liked (or didn’t like) at different stages of his career, or how he learned to play different songs,  might not be for everybody.  But for me, as a fan and a lifetime guitar player too, I ate it all up.

In any case, that’s just a very small part of his story. He writes about his childhood, growing up an Air Force kid with a dad who was not always around, and his parents’ eventual  separation and divorce. He talks about their poverty, a childhood spent moving around and living in different cities. He describes being a poor kid in school, but one who was smart and did well despite the obstacles he faced in life and his family situation.

And he talks about how he took up the guitar, started playing in bands after seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan (like most rock musicians of the Boomer generation, including me), and ended up in college in Gainesville, Florida, where he met Tom Petty, and was invited to join Petty’s band after playing a flashy Chuck Berry lick on his cheap Japanese guitar.

From there, he moves on to a rich and satisfying history of the band. He talks about his fellow band members, how they met and got together, their talents, their ways of being, and how they got along. He brings the whole band rock and roll experience, and their personal relationships within the group very much alive.

I particularly liked reading about now he met his wife Marcy in the early days of the band in Los Angeles, and how they fell in love and built a life together. He does a wonderful job conveying the challenges and complexities of building a real, fully human life, a strong marriage and a close-knit family while immersed in the chaos of a life as an artist in a major rock and roll band, one that was frequently in the studio at all hours, or out on tour.

It seemed almost amazing to learn that there are some people in the rock community who apparently have long-term stable marriages and family lives – that’s not the typical public image of a rock star or famous entertainer. But it was a very heartwarming element of Campbell’s story.

There are so many other interesting aspects to this book. Campbell shares many of his thoughts about his own songwriting process, and his creative collaborations and deep friendship with Petty. He discusses nuances of his guitar playing style, and how he developed it, becoming one of the most iconic rock guitarists in the world in the process.

And then there were some powerful moments in the band’s history, like the time Tom Petty’s new agent talked to Campbell and the other members (without Petty), and presented them with a new "take it or leave it" financial arrangement that gave Petty a larger share of the proceeds. Campbell describes how he talked the other band members through this hard recognition that Petty was the main star, but that they were all going to end up doing well if they stuck with the band, even if Petty came out richer than they did. It was a pivotal moment, and one I'd never heard before.

Heartbreaker is an excellent rock autobiography, and an entertaining memoir from one of the great sidemen and lead guitarists in rock history. If you’re a fan of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, it’s a must read. For all others, it’s at least a very interesting life story of a talented and likeable person and artist, who chose the life of a famous musician, celebrity and entertainer. Recommended.

Personal Note: My new single, In This Hotel Room, released today!

Hello, friends! I'm happy to announce my latest new original single, In This Hotel Room, was released today! As always, the song is on all the popular music streaming services. You can also see the lyric video and hear the song on my YouTube channel. Just click the link in my "favorites" list in the right hand margin of this blog to go there.

This song was an interesting change-up for me: it's a slower, quieter story about a modern romance. And check out the cool orchestral arrangement, added courtesy of sound engineer Matt Taylor at Echo Lake Studios, who also mixed and mastered the song. Having a string section and a French horn sound in one of my songs is a new and intriguing experience!

 

For those who are new to this blog, and my other creative interests, I've been writing and recording original songs since 2021. My style is essentially rock, but with country, folk and Americana elements too, depending on the song. I released my first album, Strangers, in 2023, then took a hiatus from recording in 2024 while working on a memoir writing project. But now I'm back at it, with this song and another one I released in July called Unknown Land. 

 

If you want to hear my other songs, you can listen and watch the music videos on my YouTube channel, or find just the songs on all the common music streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and Pandora. Look for "Wayne Parker", and make sure it's the one with the Strangers album listed (to be sure it's my page). 

 

I'll be back soon with a new post. Happy weekend! 

Substack Writer Review: Christopher Armitage and the Existentialist Republic.

As most of my readers probably know, I recently joined Substack and began distributing my articles from The Memory Cache blog via Substack emails as well. 

In the past year, as media consolidation under the control of billionaires has accelerated, and those wealthy corporations and owners have bent the knee to the current regime in Washington, many talented and well-known writers and thinkers have fled to Substack from mainstream media platforms. That has made Substack a great place to find good writing and opinion on current events.

 

I subscribe to a number of popular Substack writers, and would recommend any and all of them. My list includes Heather Cox Richardson, the noted American historian; Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who resigned from the New York Times; Timothy Snyder, famed historian of authoritarianism who wrote On Tyranny and On Freedom; and several others. Most of the people on my list would be familiar as regular guest commentators to anyone who’s spent time in the past few years watching CNN or MSNBC. I’m sure there are many other good ones too, if only I had time to keep up with the ones I’m already reading.

 

Interestingly, though, the writer who has most caught my attention in recent weeks is someone I’ve never seen on TV, or heard of before. I’m not even sure how I first had one of his emails show up in my inbox, but after I’d read a few of them, I quickly subscribed. And having followed him now for a couple of months, I am recommending him to everyone who is concerned about the ongoing political, economic and moral calamity of the Trump 2.o administration and our current moment.

 

His name is Christopher Armitage, and he writes under the publication name of “The Existentialist Republic”. I don’t know him, or that much about his life story, and because of that, in recommending him I assume the risk that there may be negative things about him and his background I don’t know. I have no reason to think so, but I can’t be certain. It’s just a caveat.

 

What I do know based on what I found online (and what he has written) is that he lives in Spokane, Washington. He is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force, with multiple deployments overseas. He also has experience as a security consultant, and a background in law enforcement and prison administration. He has written several books and peer-reviewed research articles, including one book on police reform and another on the psychological roots of American conservatism. He ran as a Democrat for Congress in 2020, but lost in the primary. He also claims to live alone with three cats.

 

That’s what I know about him so far. I’ve never seen him on TV, but he has 37,000 subscribers on Substack. Apparently I’m not the only person taking him and his writing seriously. So what does he have to say?

 

In his almost daily email articles, he has focused on a few recurring ideas and themes, which he bolsters with well-footnoted research from a wide range of credible sources, including legal decisions and court opinions, news stories, histories, studies and position papers. The major themes include:

 

·       American democracy at the federal level is already in a death spiral due to corporate and right-wing ideological capture of Congress, the Supreme Court, and mass media, along with gerrymandering and the undemocratic elements of the Constitution itself. He explains and provides extensive examples and reasoning to support this assessment.

 

·       The crisis posed by Trump’s authoritarianism and his regime’s lawlessness and corruption can best be opposed by using the same kinds of state power, aggressive tactics and local prerogatives that the right has used for generations to resist federal authority.

 

·       He advocates for “soft secession” by blue states. This is not a call for an “armed civil war” type of secession, but rather for developing alliances between blue states, and building new state-based institutions to resist the worst policies of the current federal regime, and to provide citizens in blue states with the social goods and safety net that the federal government seems so determined not to provide to the nation’s people.     

 

His daily articles are full of specific, detailed plans and legal tactics that could plausibly be carried out, and would almost surely be popular in at least the half of the country that wants to live in a democratic society of equal rights, the rule of law, prosperity, fairness and generosity, along with a strong social safety net.

 

One idea of his I have heard elsewhere advocates states withholding or delaying tax payments to the federal government, based on several possible legal theories. Because the larger blue states in general are wealthier and more populous, and pay more tax than they get back from the federal government, shutting off the flow of tax money to the feds and needy red states would be a powerful means of exerting financial and political pressure. I have read elsewhere that several large Democratic-controlled states are already considering this option. 

 

In another recent article, Armitage pointed out a clause in the Affordable Care Act that allows states to band together to provide access to healthcare plans across multiple states. He writes that this was written into the law as a concession to Republicans, to let red states join together to offer cheaper, less generous policies than offered by the federal government through Obamacare. But ironically, he argues, blue states could band together to develop multi-state healthcare plans where they could leverage their combined economic clout and population power to create major, unified multi-state single payer systems, all without any federal means of stopping them (since it's allowed under the existing ACA law).

He has also advocated for the idea that blue state attorney generals could and should bring the full force of state law against federal officials who commit state crimes and corruption under supposed federal authority. Even if these cases (civil and criminal) don’t always succeed, he contends, they can make the individual cost and personal risk to federal officials much higher, and slow things down. He provides examples of how and when this has been done. And as he points out, this is just flipping the script on MAGA Republicans: it’s showing that Democratic-controlled states too can assert their rights boldly, and use state legal systems to frustrate overreaching and unpopular actions by federal officials from the opposing political camp.

 

He has so many good and novel ideas and observations, many of which I’ve heard from no one else, that it’s hard to keep track of them all. But what I also really like is that after proposing these creative ways to fight back effectively against the Trump regime at the state level, protect the people and institutions in our states under assault, and build the sort of just and compassionate society we want to live in, he gives his readers the information to advocate for these ideas, by providing the contact information for the state officials in our own states to whom the ideas should be addressed.  

 

Of course, no one has all the right ideas, and after the 2025 electoral results on Tuesday, many people might say that now those who want to save democracy and the rule of law should focus on winning the 2026 mid-term elections as the best means for resisting Trump and his followers. But in the meantime, if you are looking for positive, constructive, realistic and original ideas for how to defend democracy and a free, prosperous American society, you’ll find them in Christopher Armitage’s Substack writing at The Existentialist Republic. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization (2025). Bill McKibben

For those who don’t know, Bill McKibben is a lifelong environmental activist, journalist and author of more than twenty books. His first book, The End of Nature (1989), was one of the first books about climate change written for general audiences, and he has written many other books about the environment and humans ever since. He is also one of the founders of the climate change activist group 350.org, as well as Third Act, an environmental activist group for seniors.

So presumably we can expect dire warnings of impending environmental disaster from any new McKibben book, right? But with his new book, Here Comes the Sun, we get something unexpected – a very hopeful book in this time of environmental and political peril.

I was fortunate to be able to hear the author speak a few weeks ago, when he was in town for Seattle Arts and Lectures, and his talk in person reinforced the message of this new book. The message is this: even though our political situation may be dire, the worldwide prospects for replacing the fossil fuel industry with renewable energy sources have never been greater.

McKibben tells the story of how solar and wind power technology is being adopted around the world at rates never seen before. He contrasts our current situation during the second Trump administration in the United States, where the U.S. government is doing everything it can to preserve fossil fuel industries and undermine or block renewables, with both the ongoing rapid growth in renewable energy and storage capacity here in our own country (including in very red states), and astounding increases in renewable energy generation in many other parts of the world.

He particularly contrasts the obstructionist energy policies of the U.S. administration with China’s decision to become the manufacturing center for renewable energy generation technology, and other hardware and software needed for electric-based economies around the world. The result has been that the cost of solar panels is continuing to drop rapidly, as supplies of Chinese solar panels increase and economies of scale kick in.

Countries around the world are taking rapid advantage of Chinese solar equipment, and McKibben points out that China is now rapidly becoming the top manufacturer of affordable, high-quality electric vehicles and appliances in the world too.

Not content to just make these general assertions, he provides charts and graphs to demonstrate how much of the power needs here and abroad are now coming from renewable energy sources, and to show that a transition to a new electric age appears to be happening much faster than we thought. He also has some remarkable recent anecdotes to share to support this claim.

For example, in one of the poorest regions of Pakistan, local power companies began to notice the strange phenomenon of falling demand for power from consumers during the past year. It turned out that poor Pakistani people and communities were importing cheap solar panels from China, and hooking them up locally, thus creating decentralized electric power sources that cost little, and freed them from needing their power utility’s fossil fuel-generated power.

Similar stories are emerging from around the world, as other countries and their peoples discover that setting up solar and wind power is a far cheaper and easier solution to their power needs than importing fossil fuels. He mentions the fact that solar power units are now being sold in many countries as “balcony” units than can be purchased from big box stores, hung outside of apartments, and plugged right into a wall socket to feed energy into the grid. 

He also discusses the importance of improvements in battery technology, production and deployments, and how that is helping to address the problem of how to guarantee electricity supplies remain available during the times when the sun isn't out or the wind isn't blowing.

McKibben is not underestimating the political obstacles to replacing fossil fuels, particularly here in the U.S., but he is trying to make the case for why renewable energy has suddenly become the obvious and most practical solution to the world’s power needs. One of his main talking points is that renewables are no longer the “alternatives” to fossil fuels, and we should stop thinking of them as just backups or "next best" solutions to fossil fuels. 

In fact, he claims, they are now the obvious go-to solution, because they are less expensive, cleaner, more cost-effective over time, and now abundantly available due especially to Chinese manufacturing and sales. All we need to do is keep deploying them, and prevent the fossil fuel companies and their supporters in politics and power utilities from obstructing progress in the necessary transition away from fossil fuels.

This is an up-to-the-minute primer on renewable energy, and why and how solar and wind power, along with fast-increasing energy storage technologies, are now poised to take us into a new electric age, even in a time of political adversity. If some of his predictions seem a little overly rosy, it is still an uplifting and encouraging story in an often dark and demoralizing time.

Here Comes the Sun is a quick read and an optimistic tale, just what we need to hear at this moment, as the current U.S. administration tries to dismantle environmental protections, and drag our energy systems back to the mid-twentieth century. Recommended.