Book Review: Fluke: Chance, Chaos and Why Everything We Do Matters. Brian Klaas (2024).

In one of my favorite lines from my song Strangers, I posed a rhetorical question: “Who can trace the mysterious chain of events that now bind us?”  Although in the song I was talking about a long love affair, it’s a question that applies more generally to everything about our lives, how we become who we are, and what combination of willful acts and serendipity shapes the reality and the history we experience. It’s a question I’ve mused about throughout my life, which probably explains my love of stories about time travel, looping repeated lifetimes, and the multiverse. Most of you probably have thought about it too.

 

Imagine my delight, then, to discover Brian Klaas’s best-selling new non-fiction book Fluke, which explores  these very topics of random chance, chaos, the role of unpredictable and unexpected events in our lives and the world around us, and how our own choices and actions interact with those of others and our environment to shape our lives, and the greater reality in which we live.

 

Klaas draws us in immediately with an introductory chapter, in which he tells a true story about a historical figure whose personal experiences decades before, and his subjective emotional response to those experiences, prevented one mass casualty event, and led to another one instead. He uses this dramatic example and several others to lay out his intentions for the book: to dispel the comforting but (in his view) false notions most of us have that the world operates in ways that are predictable and comprehensible in terms of causality, and that we can identify and shape the course of events through reason and the choices we make.

 

In essence, the book is a social scientist’s thoughtful exploration of the “butterfly effect” – the familiar theory in philosophy that even tiny forces, like the pattern of a single butterfly’s beating wings, can alter the whole course of history. Klaas makes the case for the notion that even small flukes, or unexpected events, really can have tremendous impacts on the course of events in our lives and world.

 

In making that case, he introduces a corollary: that we are deeply enmeshed in the lives of others, their choices and the random events that affect them too. In other words, we aren’t ever really in control of our fates, no matter how hard we try to guide the course of our lives through rationality or our actions. We still have to navigate events over which we have no control, and often don’t see coming.

 

One conclusion he draws is that we should feel empowered by our knowledge of the effects of random events to do things we believe in, even if it might seem that nothing will come of it. The author suggests this is true, exactly because we really don’t know what effect our actions will have on others. If we’re trying to influence others, for example, we might be ignored and not much will change at all as a result of what we said or did. But it also might change everything, or have an unexpected effect on others far greater than we expected.

 

The phenomenon of a social media post, or a music or video clip “going viral” would be obvious examples of that kind of unexpected impact on others. Or it might be nothing more than a quiet conversation that changes someone else’s life trajectory or opinions forever. There are an endless number of things we can do to affect others, and the world around us, so the author suggests there’s no reason not to try, even if we might doubt it will really change anything.     

 

I thought about this book the past two weeks, as the situation involving President Biden’s age and whether he should run for President again or not has played out in the national news. I haven’t usually been someone who wrote letters or emails to politicians, but in this case I did. And I did so, knowing my messages (along with those of many others) might help shape events and exert influence in a direction I preferred, but also realizing the ultimate outcome was unknown, and might arrive via any number of other unexpected and unrelated possible events.

 

In other words, it was strangely comforting to realize based on the ideas in Fluke that I could take actions in furtherance of my preferred outcome, and that they might even make a difference, but also accept with equanimity that my actions’ consequences and effects on developments like this are ultimately unknowable and unpredictable. I guess you might call that learning to “be philosophical”.

 

I’ve long enjoyed the writing of Malcolm Gladwell, because of the intriguing ways he challenges ordinary beliefs and assumptions, and takes us on a journey to look at things we think we already know or understand, but from different perspectives. In challenging what we think we know, and providing us with new information and analyses we might not have heard before, this kind of curious counter narrative can change us, and forever alter the way we view the world around us.  

 

Brian Klaas is taking us on that same type of  contrarian intellectual voyage in this book, with a similarly lively writing style and considerable success in making his case. I found it fascinating, and a pleasure to read and reflect upon. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It (2022). Richard V Reeves.

I recently read this truly excellent book by Richard Reeves, on a topic which the author mentions he was discouraged from writing about by several friends and professional colleagues, due to its extremely controversial nature.  

 

He wrote it anyway, and I'm very glad he did.  It's all about why and how men and boys, and a wide range of their contemporary problems and needs, require our attention and resources, and why neither the Left nor the Right are getting it right with respect to the difficulties faced by men in our society today.

Reeves anticipates the predictable feminist-oriented reaction against this position, and the assumption that he and his arguments are misanthropic and anti-women in nature, which they are not. At the outset, he states a number of important caveats about what he's not arguing for, principally the expectation that he hopes to preference the needs of men over women, and then moves on through chapter after chapter, exploring many ideas and the scientific research in support of the notion that we need to pay more attention to the plight of men and boys.

 

This is a book that needs to be read in its entirety, and the various pieces of the puzzle which he explores need to be seen together as a whole to be fully understood.  But here are just a few of the important points he considers.    
 

Boys and men have fallen behind in school and academics.  Women at this point, as a result of Title IX and 50 years of widespread governmental and institutional support, now succeed at a far higher percentage of the population in acquiring education in most subject areas than do men.  Why is this?  
 

Boys and men are also struggling in employment – despite the "glass ceiling" for women, and the predominance of men at the top of the corporate elite.  In fact, a significant number of young, able-bodied working age men have dropped out of the work world entirely, and are no longer in the labor pool, which has created major negative impacts in other areas of social life, such as family stability and lower availability of suitable or desirable mates for many women.  
 

Black boys and men, as distinct from males who are white or even in other ethnic groups, have a specially compounded set of problems caused by the legacy of slavery, systematic demonization of black men as a result of systemic racism, and widespread lack of functional fathers and male role models in many black families due to widespread imprisonment, welfare laws and other structural impediments put in place over many generations, which need particular focused attention and help.
 

Reeves then makes a strong case for something that on some levels, most of us accept, which is that human boys and men do have biologically-based differences from girls and women. This idea, seemingly so obvious, has actually been highly contested in some circles for the past 50 or more years, in service of the need and desire to remove sex-linked characteristics as the basis for discrimination against women.  

 

Reeves' analysis on this central topic is refreshing and insightful. Many of the differences between men and women that have been universally recognized and accepted over eons have actually been verified in much social research recently. As he points out, the stereotypical male tendencies and behaviors that are different from those of women are not "bugs" of masculinity.  They’re features, resulting from evolution, which in the past rewarded men for focusing on aspects of the needs of their families and communities which were different from those of women, due primarily to the men's lack of ability to bear children.

 

Reeves mentions common beliefs about the differences in men and women, such as that men are more interested in things, while women are more interested in people, or that because men have more testosterone, that leads men to greater aggression, risk-taking, and more competitiveness, all features which play out over time as the evolutionary tools by which men struggle to be able to reproduce their genes, by gaining access to women's attentions and their bodies. 

But these differences aren’t (or shouldn't be) grounds for discrimination (as they have been in the past) – they’re simply tendencies that overlap between men and women, and appear in different proportions in each individual. This means that in a perfect world, for example, we still wouldn’t expect to see a perfect balance in the number of men and women in all employment fields or areas of interest.  

 

This point was a revelation to me -- that we shouldn't always strive or expect to see complete parity for example in male/female distributions within any particular profession, even if everyone has equal access to them. The distribution instead should mirror the averages of how interested each sex (as a group) is in that profession.

 

The point, as Reeves says, is to make it possible for all people to realize their best interests and capabilities.  Our lives and opportunities are not and should not be controlled by just our sex at birth, and the attributes that come with it. They are controlled instead by three different factors:  nature (what we're each born with), nurture (the training and support we receive), and our personal action and choices. 

 

We can encourage women in STEM, but that doesn't mean that 50% of the profession will ever be women -- as a part of the population, they probably are just not quite as interested in those fields as men.  But it might be 41%, and if so, they should have the opportunity to succeed, just as much as the men should. 
 

One important point that derives from all this in Reeves' view is that treating traditionally male characteristics as a “toxic” pathology is damaging to men, and it's wrong. Masculinity is only toxic when it doesn’t serve the greater good of the species, or isn’t under mature adult control.  No one ever says anything about “toxic femininity”. When harnessed correctly, masculinity is natural, a result of evolution, and of benefit to society.  One example of this would be the greater propensity of men to take personal risks in defense of others.  

 

In Reeves' view, the #METOO movement's use of the term "toxic masculinity" as a routine pejorative for men and the way they behave is demoralizing, too broad-brush, and doesn't take into account the negative psychological effect it has on the morale and self-image of many boys and men, especially young ones trying to understand how they are supposed to behave in the world, and what their self-worth is.
 

The author then points out the opposite side of recognizing the positive and natural value of masculinity, which is that men also have “female” characteristics in varying proportions, while many women also have varying proportions of "male" characteristics. Care-taking and nurturing tendencies, and greater social interest and engagement, exist in men too – just to a somewhat lesser degree on average.  Women similarly have aggressive, competitive and less social tendencies too, just to a somewhat lesser degree on average than the men.
 

The chapter on the politics of all this is particularly thoughtful and convincing.  Reeves asserts that the political left and the progressive/feminist ideologues need to recognize and accept that there are truly biological differences between men and women, and that admitting that is not a basis for justifying individual and systemic discrimination against women. Conversely, the political right, which has been capitalizing in recent years on reactionary anti-feminist feelings among many men, needs to realize that there’s no reclaiming the oppressive, hierarchical masculinity of yesteryear.  

 

The central challenge for all of us is to realize that it’s necessary to have both men and women adapt to the new reality of a society based on equality between men and women. It’s not a zero-sum game: we can support women and their rights, but also support the men too. But if the left (progressives) won’t deal with the very real problems and difficulties boys and men are currently facing in our society, then the opportunists and bad actors, recognizing the grievances and sense of loss that many men feel as their traditional roles have disappeared, will surely come up with their own bad solutions.  The rise of Donald Trump and the misogynistic alt-right demonstrate this risk all too clearly. 
 

In the last part of the book, Reeves begins to try to pull together recommendations for what should be done to help boys and men succeed. He starts with the equitable and obvious claim that for the past 50 years in the United States, a great deal has been done to advance women’s health, rights and status in society, and that's good.  But nothing of the sort is being done for men, and it should be.
 

He suggests that we need to promote more men in the HEAL professions (health, education, and other social service fields),  just as women in STEM has been pushed.  We should get rid of the stigma of “women’s professions”, and open up more employment and career opportunities for men in these types of work, where they are needed and could have good careers. This might also improve pay scales for women in those professions.
 

One of his other innovative ideas for improving boys' outcomes in education and later life, which has drawn a lot of both positive comment and criticism, is what he calls "Redshirting" the boys – holding boys back a year (after the girls) in starting school.  He argues this would provide a significant positive effect on giving boys better results, because in general their intellectual development is delayed compared to girls (another biological difference between the sexes which recently has been well-established through research). 

 

Parents could still have the choice to opt out of a general system change like this, based on the needs of their particular children. And Reeves expresses willingness to hear other proposals to help with the uneven rate of brain development between boys and girls, relative to education.  But he's trying to start a discussion of how to help boys do better in an educational process which is currently stacked against them, compared to the girls -- a worthwhile and timely objective.

 

This book is a fascinating exploration of the situation of modern boys and men in America, and what they need to be successful and productive humans in a world shared more fairly with girls and women. It's full of important and genuinely humane proposals and insights to make things better for all of us, as we try to create a society where everyone can have a better chance to realize their own hopes and dreams, whether male or female. 

 

The book (and this review) may well be controversial, and challenge many peoples' thoughts and feelings about the relationship between the sexes, and their respective roles, but it is well worth taking the time to read it, and think more deeply about these issues in the light of contemporary science and social science research. Very highly recommended.

Book Review: God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor and the Search for Meaning (2021). Meghan O’Gieblyn.

Here as the subject for my last post and review for 2022 is one of the more unusual and challenging, yet fun books I’ve read this year. I discovered the author, Meghan O’Gieblyn, from reading her amusing advice column Cloud Support in Wired magazine, and decided she seemed somehow unusual and funny enough as a writer that I should read her latest book, God, Human, Animal, Machine.

I knew from the title that it had something to do with technology, A.I., and what it all means, but beyond that I didn’t know what to expect. As it turned out, it was a strange delight, a series of chapter essays exploring the state of the world and the human condition in the midst of the advanced technologies that now shape our lives, as seen through her own life and story.

O’Gieblyn is a fascinating narrator. Born into and raised in a strict Christian fundamentalist family, and a committed believer throughout her youth, she attended a Bible college, where she dove deep into the history of Western and Christian philosophy. But somewhere along the way, she lost her religion, became an atheist and a non-believer, and later for a time a cocktail waitress with an addiction problem.

Despite this dramatic change in her beliefs and circumstances, she never lost her curiosity about the mysteries of existence. She became a writer about technology, which clearly fascinates her, but the issues which remain at the fore for her as a writer have to do with how we humans relate to and are affected by the marvelous things we invent. She also has a unique ability as a writer to probe these issues in essays by combining her own life experiences, emotional responses to people and situations she encounters, and her exhaustive knowledge of the history and ideas of philosophy.

The first chapter begins with a discussion of her experience with a small robotic dog which was provided to her temporarily by the manufacturer for research purposes. In a story that is both amusing and poignant, she talks about her first interactions with the robot dog, the uses to which she puts it, the role it takes on in her life, and the disquieting emotions she develops as she and the toy become more familiar with each other.

From this funny initial anecdote, she expands into a wider discussion of mind, consciousness, the capacity of artificial creations to have them, and what it means for us as humans to develop relationships with them. That discussion becomes quite deep and informative, as she contrasts and compares current ideas on these foundational human questions with those of many of the greatest philosophers throughout history.

I’ve never seriously studied philosophy, but this book was a crash course in the ideas of being, existence, mind, consciousness and the nature of reality, going back more than two thousand years. What made it particularly exciting was to realize the extent to which these same issues that surface with respect to artificial intelligence and robotics are the same existential questions that have been asked and pondered for millennia, before any of our current science and technology existed.

One particularly intriguing part of the book discusses the modern “trans-humanist” movement, now embraced by many Silicon Valley eminences and high-tech visionaries (or would-be visionaries), as first predicted by the futurist Ray Kurzweil. This is the notion that the ultimate end state for humanity, much to be desired, is to upload our personalities and memories to the cloud, and thereby attain immortality across the universe. A book I reviewed recently, Survival of the Richest, concerning the escape and survival fantasies of billionaires, documented the current state and wide popularity of this belief system among the very rich, the tech elites and some celebrities.

O’Gieblyn doesn’t put much stock in this movement or the likelihood of its success, but rather than simply skewering it, she brilliantly lays out her own observations of how closely the dreams, aims and objectives of the trans-humanists match the world view and goals of an earlier Christian apocalyptic movement, a thousand years ago. That one didn’t really work out either, as she gently points out.

Throughout the book, the author relates the ways that her questions about so many new technologies and areas of science – robots, artificial intelligence, quantum uncertainty, chatbots, life extension, the pandemic, and viruses – keep winding back to closely mirror the questions she struggled with in her days as a young Christian student, as she tried to understand and justify her existence, faith and beliefs. The book becomes the story of humanity’s eternal quest for meaning, in parallel with her own personal journey to find answers to the same questions, even though now surrounded by previously unimaginable and novel technologies.

The book is full of smart insights, tough questions, and her personal anecdotes and admissions, all skillfully tied together into an entertaining, challenging and thought-provoking package through her unassuming but expert narration. One of the ways she particularly excels is in her ability to connect topics that we might not have considered together before, and make compelling points in doing so. Who knew philosophy could be so entertaining, as well as so important to the moral and societal choices we face with today's technologies? Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Loop: How Technology is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back (2022). Jacob Ward.

As we approach the end of 2022, and the beginning of a new year, I’m posting my last two book reviews of this first year of my blog, which I began in February. This time of the year is usually a time for reflection, and for looking forward to next year’s projects and challenges, so it’s fitting that I’m choosing to review two books I’ve read recently that take a similar approach to evaluating aspects of the technology-steeped world in which we live.

In The Loop, NBC News Technology Correspondent Jacob Ward coins the term “the loop” to symbolize an iterative dynamic in our society and lives whereby artificial intelligence, and the computerized algorithms that increasingly influence and control many aspects of our modern lives, are in fact shrinking our capacity for personal choice and individual decision-making.

He begins with several chapters on recent research in behavioral psychology that have demonstrated the extent to which we as humans respond unconsciously to stimuli in our environment of which we aren’t even fully aware, and process information and uncertainty in the “reality” we are experiencing on two different levels, one of which is fast and impulsive, and thus prone to being influenced and misled by past experiences and beliefs, while the other is slower, more analytical and fact-based.

From an evolutionary standpoint, this two-level thinking process worked reasonably well to allow us to survive and prosper in the primitive world in which we evolved. System 1, the more automatic and frequently used one, allows us to make fast decisions and act immediately without a lot of thought, while System 2 allows us to apply slower, more “critical thinking” evaluation to difficult information and stimuli. The combination of the two allows for quick response to threats, but also the ability to grow, learn, and change.

Unfortunately, the invention of computer algorithms, based increasingly on vast quantities of data and attempts to build artificial intelligence to help us to make choices, has created a dangerous vulnerability for us. The businesses building these systems, Ward suggests, have studied the weaknesses of our human decision-making processes, and tailored their algorithms to exploit our emotions and impulses for the benefit of their bottom line, or in support of hidden political objectives or opinions, rather than to just help us make better decisions.

This is not a startling new revelation at this point. It’s common knowledge by now that smartphones were designed to use visual and aural rewards to keep us looking at them, and that social media’s algorithms were designed to maximize our emotional engagement with their feeds, by favoring and promoting posts that engender fear and anger, but Ward does an excellent job of demonstrating how the dynamic plays out in a variety of other different contexts and real-world situations.

For example, in one chapter, he describes how the online gaming industry has created incentives in their games that are specifically designed to create addiction in their users. Along the way, he introduces us to Nir Eyal, a Stanford MBA who wrote the popular book Hooked on how to build “habit-forming” products, which became a bible for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and Robert  Cialdini's classic work Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (previously reviewed here) on how to get people to do what you want.

Ward goes on to explore many problems in applying algorithms and artificial intelligence tools in areas such as education, therapy, policing and crime, and discusses troubling aspects of these attempts that surface repeatedly across the different application areas. 

He raises the fact that we often don’t know or understand how many of these algorithms arrive at their decisions. They're usually "black boxes", which we're expected (and often required) to accept as valid on face value, even though some have been challenged in court and ultimately found to be faulty or unreliable.  In many cases, these algorithms are protected by intellectual property rights, so that the individual negatively affected by them is explicitly barred from understanding the basis for the decision the algorithm rendered.

Ward also points out that organizations like courts, law enforcement agencies, insurance companies, credit agencies and banks often use computer algorithms to make life-altering decisions based on underlying big data which may reflect existing social biases and injustices. This process of using real data based on unfair conditions to make new unjust decisions simply perpetuates and reinforces the existing injustice, under the misleading appearance of the algorithm's "objectivity".

This is a wide-ranging and interesting exploration of how the alluring promise of machine intelligence and algorithms to enrich our lives has instead too often been used to limit our choices, and to manipulate us for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. Recommended.

Book Review: Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America (2022). Mark Follman.

By now, after decades of horrifying mass shootings across the United States, in schools, malls, grocery stores, post offices, concerts, movie theaters and anywhere else that groups of people gather, most people have probably lost all hope that we will ever get this problem under control.

Particularly with the perpetual political deadlock and partisan divides on the issue of gun control, mass gun violence in our country seems to be an intractable problem from hell, with no realistic solutions available to stop the killing, and seemingly no one really trying to do anything useful.

Mark Follman’s new book, Trigger Points, provides a refreshing bit of relief from our weary and jaded view of this grim situation, along with many new insights into the nature of the problem. His topic is the field and study of threat assessment, a discipline that can be applied to many different behaviors and real-world situations, but in this case has to do with those experts in law enforcement, psychology, and education who have quietly and slowly begun to piece together a set of tools for identifying those at risk of committing attacks and finding constructive ways to head off or prevent those attacks before they happen.

In the process of telling the history of the small groups and individuals who have done the research and developed theories and practices for application in differing situations, we learn many interesting details of the research data and conclusions of the experts, which often contradict popular beliefs about mass gun violence and its perpetrators.

Some of the most important and surprising revelations in the book have to do with the popular but mistaken beliefs about the categories of people who commit these terrible violent acts. For example, it is widely believed that the perpetrators are almost all young white men, but in fact there have been many men across the entire spectrum of races and ethnic backgrounds, as well as a few women, who have carried out these kinds of mass attacks.

Another widespread but wrong belief is that all these murderous individuals are “mentally ill”. While many or most of them undoubtedly are coping with issues of depression, domestic neglect or abuse, self-loathing and suicidal ideation, only a fraction of these disturbed individuals who commit mass attacks have previous diagnoses of major mental illness. And many of them are leading lives that from the outside appear "normal", while holding down jobs, attending school or otherwise appearing to function in society.

A third misleading and useless popular belief, according to the author and the research, is that there is a useful “profile” of the mass killer that can be used to easily identify who is a likely potential mass murderer. Instead, what the threat assessment researchers have found is that there is a process, a life path followed by the individual, which has common features across many cases, and which can be recognized and interrupted with suitable interventions.

It would be easy to belittle this research, and the experts who have been developing this field of threat assessment, by pointing to the many cases of mass gun violence that continue to occur. The counter argument to that skepticism is the number of cases that have already been prevented by threat assessment experts and teams, and the lives that have already been saved, which the author spotlights from little-known case histories. As bad as it is, it could be worse.

What becomes clear from Follman’s account is the fact that these techniques and insights, developed from extensive research over the past fifty years (including extensive interviews of surviving mass killers), are not yet widely known outside the small expert community. The point is that they should be known, and the techniques and science behind it more widely shared.

Where there are existing threat assessment programs in place, combining the expertise of law enforcement, school officials, HR representatives, and others to help intervene and assist people headed down the road toward mass violence, there have been many successes. It was interesting to learn that the state of Oregon, and now Washington, are among the leading areas in the country for threat assessment programs. We need more of these programs, and many more people trained to recognize and report the common symptoms of troubled people preparing for violent acts in time for interventions to take place.

There will never be a way of anticipating every mass casualty attack, and as the author acknowledges, the number of deaths in mass gun violence events pales beside the ordinary daily toll of gun-related murder and suicide. There is no perfect solution. But in this book, we see sensible, research-based methods of heading off many of the worst gun massacres in our society, and saving the lives of victims and even sometimes the perpetrators.

It is also encouraging to hear the message that even with the huge numbers of guns in our population, the ease of acquiring them and our inability to put effective limits on access to guns due to political hyper-partisanship on this issue, there are still things we can do to improve our situation and lower the risk.

This is an important myth-busting expose’ on a confounding problem which is practically never out of our headlines anymore. It offers hope, insight, an inspiring tale of a few dedicated researchers and activists on a long mission to find effective solutions, and a plan for how we might begin to stem the tide of mass gun violence in our country. Highly recommended. 

Honorable Mentions: Automation, Data and the Big Companies of the Tech Economy.

Today I thought I'd share another group of reviews of five good books I read from a few years back, in my ongoing "Honorable Mentions" series. The topics for today are books about high tech: the companies, our computers, phones and automation, big data, social media and the impact of these contemporary features of life on us as individuals and on society. Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

 

Book Review: World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech (2017). Franklin Foer.

The author of this thoughtful critique of the role of the major tech companies on our lives, and particularly its effect on the state of our public discourse, is a well-respected writer from major periodicals such as The New Republic and The Atlantic. He also wrote a popular and fun book about soccer and its place in international sports, How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (2010), which I enjoyed, and which has been translated into dozens of languages.

This book is an eloquent rumination on the negative impacts on human society and freedom resulting from the economic and social dominance of the new technological corporate giants of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. Of particular interest are some of the chapters where he extrapolates from his own experiences, for example when he was involved in the attempted “reboot” of The New Republic after it was bought by an early Facebook gazillionaire, Chris Hughes.

Foer explores the philosophical, psychological, ethical, economic and political aspects of our current situation, living in a global economy dominated by monopolistic technology companies and their financial imperatives. Recommended.

 

Book Review: The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (2014). Nicholas Carr.

It can be hard to remember (even for those of us who were there back then) that as recently as the first five or six years of the 2000s, we all lived in a world where no one owned a smartphone, and social media as we now know it was still in its infancy. When these tech innovations first appeared, we were a little skeptical, but mostly full of wonder, for the promise of all the benefits they might bring to our lives.

There is no question that these creations have changed our lives, and in many respects for the better. Yet from early on, some of us also wondered how the world being created by ubiquitous computerization and automation would change and negatively impact us as individuals and as social creatures in the world.

Carr was one of the early social critics of the automation revolution we have experienced since the beginning of the 21st century. He focuses particularly on the changing nature of work, our human creativity, and what it does to us and our freedom to become so entirely dependent on machines to do much of our thinking, production and decision-making for us.

This is a thought-provoking analysis of how our clever devices and high tech inventions in the areas of automation and artificial intelligence are changing us, and not necessarily for the better, as individuals and as a species. Recommended.



Book Review: Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race and Identity: What Our Online Selves Tell Us About Our Offline Selves (2015). Christian Rudder.

This and the following book, Everybody Lies, are among my favorites in this genre of modern tech social criticism and theory, because of their focus on what can be learned about whole populations from the vast databases of personal and individual information that we voluntarily provide, often unwittingly, to major online applications and the corporate giants who own them.

Dataclysm was written by an early and very successful entrepreneur in the online dating marketplace, as a co-founder of the dating site OkCupid. In it, he explains how dating and social media sites quickly learned to use the data gathering and population analytics tools of social science and “big data” to make their romantic matching algorithms more effective and successful. But as an unintended consequence, in the process of improving their matching techniques, their data analysts also uncovered vast troves of information about the extent to which the view of ourselves that we want to project to the world differs from the way we really are, and from the opinions, beliefs and prejudices we actually hold.

This book is a fascinating exploration of the ways in which big data from social media and dating sites can tell us larger truths about who we really are, and what we really believe, as opposed to what we tell ourselves and the world, with a particular focus on our true feelings about the endlessly fascinating questions of love, sexuality, sexual roles, racism, identity and other forms of prejudice. Highly recommended. 

Book Review: Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data and What the Internet Can Tell us About Who We Really Are (2017). Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.

As mentioned above, this book and Dataclysm are the two books in this group that focus on social science research based on the “big data” collected by some of our largest tech companies and most popular online applications. The author of Everybody Lies, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, is a Harvard-educated economist and New York Times writer who was formerly a data scientist at Google. His experiences at Google form the basis for much of the story he tells in this book.

The most important point I took from this book had to do with the author's explanation of the differing value and significance of online data collected from two different types of online applications, and the respective usefulness of these two types of data in social science research. The distinction he draws is between the vast troves of information collected from social sites (dating apps and social media, as highlighted in Dataclysm), as opposed to the data compiled from search engine sites, especially Google because of its dominance in the online search market.

The special value of search engine data, as he points out, comes from the fact that unlike the social sites, where people are deliberately trying to create perfected (and therefore often falsified) images of themselves, to show people only what they think the viewers want to see, on search engines people reveal exactly who they really are, by the nature of the questions they want to have answered, in what they presume is a private and anonymous online space.

From this dichotomy between the image people try to present of themselves in seeking approval from others, versus the questions they most urgently want to have answered in private when they think no one is listening, we see how “everybody lies”. 

One of the most compelling anecdotes to demonstrate this point had to do with a discovery made by a researcher in analyzing Google’s data that showed that the relative number of searches for racist jokes about blacks, when broken down by county and voting district, provided an extremely reliable and highly-correlated prediction of voting trends for and against President Obama.

Obviously (at that time, at least, before the Trump era), very few people would put “I’m a racist who hates blacks” on their social media profiles or dating site applications, yet there it was – thousands of people all over the country who thoughtlessly confessed their true beliefs by looking for racist jokes. 

It was a fascinating revelation, that something we take so much for granted now, the use of Google to answer every question that pops into our minds, could show so much about us as a population, who we really are as a people, what we want to know, and what we actually think and believe, as opposed to the images we try to create in our public-facing presentations of ourselves.

This book is an important and readable exploration of the new tools of social science and population research that have arisen as a result of search engines, social media and massive online data collection. Highly recommended.



Book Review: The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google (2017). Scott Galloway.

It’s a measure of how quickly our world has changed in the past twenty to thirty years that a book written in 2017 (only five years ago) already contains some then-startling insights that by now seem like old news, even though they’re about companies whose size, dominance and relevance has only increased in the time since it was written.

Nevertheless, The Four is a valuable and entertaining trip through the world of the four most impactful tech companies (in the author's view) whose creation stories and subsequent successes have so shaped our modern society: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.

Personally, I believe there are really five of these companies. Microsoft has been successfully dodging much of the negative attention now regularly pointed at the other four for many years, due to successful public relations work and corporate image polishing they've done since their own days as the Evil Empire of high tech domination and monopolistic practices in the late 1990s. I applaud the company's efforts over the years to become better corporate citizens, and some of it has been genuine, but I would argue that in their essential nature and behavior, their size and influence, their centrality and importance to the tech world, and in their business practices, Microsoft is not that different from the other four.   

But in any case, Galloway has written a valuable expose’ of each of the other four omnipresent companies who have come to dominate the world of high technology and our modern way of life, and the many ways in which each maintains effective control over its own sphere of influence within the interdependent tech economy. He provides interesting anecdotes and insights into the rise and continuing success of each company and its founder (or founders), along with plenty of interesting commentary. 

Galloway is a professor at New York University, and reportedly an engaging speaker as well as a successful business writer, who brings a very readable mix of humor, outrage, facts, corporate history and good writing to this notable book. Recommended.

Book Review: Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy (2021). Tom Nichols.

As you’ll recall, just last week, I did an “Honorable Mentions” post on five books about authoritarianism, democracy and recent politics. Coincidentally, though, this week I read another such book, but one with a very different outlook than most of the other ones.

Our Own Worst Enemy, written by a professor at the Naval War College, who is also a regular contributor to The Atlantic and other periodicals, turns the focus mostly away from the bad actors and would-be authoritarians whose attempts to undermine democracy here and abroad have held so much of our attention over the past several years. Instead, he argues that “we the people” need to take a hard look at ourselves and our discontents to understand why our politics have reached such a sorry state.

Nichols makes a number of interesting points that have the ring of truth about them. He begins with a well-supported assertion that we are living in a time of material abundance and technological accomplishment beyond anything humans have ever known before, where even the poor take for granted wealth and technology undreamed of by humans in the past. Despite that reality, many of us are obsessively unhappy, and focus mainly on what we perceive as constant losses and social decline (much of which is non-existent) rather than the relatively bountiful conditions all around us. This reflexive dissatisfaction, and the fear of loss, are powerful emotions, and ones easily manipulated by cynical political actors.

The author talks about the growing epidemic of narcissism, now amplified by social media, where more and more of us are focused mainly on ourselves, our own desires, and our appearance to the rest of the world. He contrasts the selfishness of the narcissistic personality with the kind of outward-looking, modest, generous and compassionate personality which is at the core of democratic behavior, and a democratic society. A successful democracy requires that we regularly show compassion and tolerance for others, including strangers, but he suggests that more of us now have little use for or concern for anyone outside of ourselves and our immediate family.

Another observation he makes has to do with boredom. He suggests that our democracy may be a victim of its own success, in creating such freedom and abundant wealth, combined with the endless passive entertainment we consume, that many of us don’t know what to do to find meaning and fulfillment. This is another void in ourselves which is ripe for manipulation by con men and hucksters (on both ends of the political spectrum), who know how to whip up enthusiasm and excitement in a bored population by appealing to imaginary threats and fears.

Several writers have recently noted the apparent vibrancy of Ukrainian democracy under threat from the Russian invasion, as compared with our angry and polarized society. The difference seems to lie in the fact that for Ukraine, the whole society is now united by the excitement, the shared threats and privations, and the clear and present danger posed to their freedom and lives by Putin’s invasion. We don’t share any such feelings of common destiny or meaning in the face of an unambiguous threat (a feeling probably last experienced here in World War II), particularly since we rely on a paid volunteer military populated by only a few of us for our common defense.  Instead we divide into factions and tribes, and allow our discontents to be nurtured by those groups and individuals, from politics to finance to media, who can profit from our antipathies toward each other.

Nichols also spends some time on the extent to which many citizens of the United States are too uninformed about policy and political issues to be able to make reasoned, rationally consistent judgments when it comes time to vote. As a case study, he looks at the significant group of voters who voted for Barack Obama twice, then voted for Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton. A comparison of the programs of the two candidates, and their respective parties, reveals little overlap in the ideologies and programs advanced by the two parties or the candidates. Yet this group of voters willingly moved their support from one side to the other apparently based on celebrity, “excitement” factors and emotional “feelings”, and the public images of the two candidates, rather than the sorts of policies they embraced, and would attempt to enact if elected.

One other item considered by the author is the growth and active promotion of “resentment” in politics, where increasingly people will act against their own interests in order to make sure that someone else doesn’t get something, and who perceive loss and humiliation in every event that benefits anyone else. Much of this he lays at the feet of social media and our entertainment industry, which stokes our own envy continuously by feeding us idealized images of other people apparently having things we might not have. 

The author himself worries through all this that he is engaged in “moral hectoring”, and perhaps he is, but nevertheless, in his call for us to look deeply at ourselves as well as others in trying to understand and hopefully ease the woes of our contemporary polarized democracy, he is making a vital appeal. It's one we should listen to and reflect upon. Recommended.

Honorable Mentions: Democracy, Authoritarianism, and American Politics.

Today I'm doing another of my "honorable mentions" posts, featuring another five good books I've read that focus on similar or related topics. Today's list includes a sampling of the best of the political science and history books related to the threats to democracy posed by autocratic authoritarian movements, including that of the Republican Party under Donald Trump.

 

Book Review: How Democracy Dies (2018). Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt.

An excellent political science book analyzing how democracy is being and has been eroded toward autocracy, comparing various scenarios and steps in other countries to what was going on during the Trump era.

This was an early warning that democracy has guardrails, in the form of legal and institutional checks and balances, and norms, and that these were heavily under assault in Trump era America. This theme is certainly far less surprising now than it was when written, but nevertheless it’s an excellent political science exploration of the ways in which democracy can be undermined and ultimately destroyed. Recommended. 

 

Book Review: The Retreat of Western Liberalism (2017). Edward Luce.

Luce provides an eloquent description of the macro-level global economic trends now shaping the world, to the advantage of rising Eastern countries and economies (especially China) and the increasing disadvantage of the West.

He provides a high-level view of why populism, nationalism, protectionism and autocracy are on the rise here and in Europe, as the middle class thins out, fast-growing economies abroad and automation at home threaten jobs and living standards, the gap between rich and poor expands, and a frightened working population in the West is turning to authoritarian solutions over traditional liberal democracy. Recommended.



Book Review: Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2020). Anne Applebaum.   

Applebaum is an excellent writer for The Atlantic, who is also an historian and subject matter expert on Eastern Europe, the post-Soviet world and authoritarianism. In this account, she draws in part on her own experiences living and traveling in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe over the past two decades to provide illustrative cases of democracies sliding into illiberal democracy and then authoritarianism.

She uses the case of Poland’s transformation under the Law and Justice Party as her point of departure, then also discusses other recent illiberal democracies and anti-democratic movements, in Poland, Spain and Turkey, as well as Brexit in the UK and the rise of Donald Trump, with his authoritarian Republican brand of politics in the USA.

Applebaum has an interesting background from which to make this critique. Her ideological preferences and associations as a writer and person (as she shares in the book) are definitely on the right end of the political spectrum, but these tendencies don’t appear to act as ideological blinders. As a historian, she is clear-eyed and even-handed in seeing the tendency toward authoritarianism within individuals and societies as being equal opportunity: it can and does arise regardless of the ideological background of the leader and his followers.

A very good account of the recent rise in authoritarian movements, and the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of democracy around the world. Recommended.  

 

Book Review:  A Warning (2019). Anonymous: A Senior Trump White House Official.

The same unknown person (now identified as Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor) who wrote an editorial in The New York Times in 2018 claiming a bunch of good people inside the administration were protecting us from Donald Trump has now written a book in which he tells us what it's like to live inside the insane Trump bubble.

And oh, by the way -- those reassurances in the editorial? It turns out they were wrong (big surprise). The author now believes that no one can keep Trump from trying to do what he wants to do, which is to destroy American democracy and become an autocrat. It is an interesting and by now completely normalized view, but nothing we don't already know.

There are many other insider accounts of the Trump administration and his pathological behavior by now, most of which I’m probably not going to read. There will be even more written. I’m afraid they’ll be writing books, plays and movies about Trump and his bizarre administration far into the future. But this book is a reasonably good representative of the contemporary genre, if you’ve never read one before. Recommended. 

 

Book Review:  The Road to Unfreedom: Russia * Europe * America (2018). Timothy Snyder.

Timothy Snyder, the noted Yale University history professor and a leading expert on modern European history, wrote one of the earliest and most excellent guidebooks to surviving the Trump presidency and preserving democracy. Little more than a pamphlet in size, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons for the Twentieth Century (2017) broke down the experiences of Hitler’s fascism and Stalin’s communism into twenty easily digestible rules and principles of how autocracy develops, and what the signs of its onset are.

In The Road to Unfreedom, Snyder provides a detailed history of recent developments in autocracy, and threats it poses to democracy around the world, focused primarily on the disappointing collapse of democratic efforts in Russia after the demise of the Soviet Union, and the ominous career of Vladimir Putin as Russia's leader.

He uses Putin’s rise as the most important contemporary instance of modern autocracy, especially in Putin’s creation of what Snyder calls “the eternal present” – an information environment where the past is rewritten to support the leader’s preferred beliefs and interests, the present is made unknowable by the careful propagation of conflicting and contradictory narratives and conspiracy theories, and belief in a different future is impossible because of the lack of any mechanism for succession of political control beyond the life of the current leader.

A portion of this book, which was written before the beginning of the Ukraine war in February, also covers elements of Putin’s ongoing plans and attempts to gain and consolidate control over Ukraine during the past decade. It provides valuable insights into why Russia invaded Ukraine, and also some history to explain why Ukraine’s resistance has been so spirited. Recommended.