Book Review: Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires (2022). Douglas Rushkoff.

I just finished reading this interesting new book by Douglas Rushkoff, a professor of media theory and digital economics at Queens/CUNY, who is also an award-winning author of numerous books, a podcaster, and a long-time technology observer and critic. 

It’s not quite what I thought I was going to be reading, which was just a travelogue through all the ways in which the stupendously wealthy are planning to escape their most feared social and human catastrophes, although it does have plenty of elements of that.

Instead, the author had a broader criticism of the ultra-rich tech magnates in mind, which has to do with what he labels “The Mindset”. The Mindset as he describes it is an intellectual framework coming out of Silicon Valley and other tech centers that combines boyish fantasies and science fiction, “techno-solutionism” (the desire to find tech solutions to every human existential and social question), Ayn Rand-style selfish individualism and libertarianism, misogyny, and a desire to dominate the world while accruing vast wealth and power.

One ironic outcome of The Mindset for the tech billionaires, Rushkoff suggests, is a need to imagine and devise complex personal survival and escape plans, funded by their vast wealth, to survive the very crises their businesses and technologies are helping to cause. These crises include all the familiar ones we’re concerned about these days: political polarization, the climate emergency caused by our fossil-fuel based economy, civil unrest, the threat of war and nuclear disaster, and the rise of authoritarianism around the world.

In the course of the book, the author recounts many of the most egregious and often ridiculous ideas, pursuits and beliefs that have become part of what he calls The Mindset. For example, he talks about the obsessions of men like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson to somehow get themselves and their wealthiest peers into space, in the belief that if they can just make space travel and life possible, they can survive the global collapse on Earth they all fear is coming.

Early in the book, Rushkoff takes us behind the scenes, to visit some of the survival estates and hideouts the super-rich have created, to try to stay alive when everything on Earth goes to pieces. He provides insights into tech-driven phenomena like the rise of blockchain and crypto currencies, which I have long thought (as does he) are massively complex and costly solutions to non-existent problems. He also talks about the plans of some tech leaders to find a way to upload their minds to computers, and to thereby achieve immortality, removed from the needs or reality of our ties to our human bodies, or alternatively to discover and invent medical technologies that will eliminate aging for themselves and their families.

Rushkoff clearly has a political opinion about all this, and constantly contrasts what he characterizes as the cold and narcissistic nature of The Mindset, and its most powerful believers, with a more humane, cooperative and altruistic world view and way of being. And I’m very sympathetic to his general outlook and moral orientation, although in some cases his analysis seems a little too simplistic and rigid.

Nevertheless, Survival of the Richest is a very thought-provoking and detailed look at some of the peculiar fantasies, excesses, projects and ambitions of the super-wealthy tech leaders of our era. Recommended.

TV Review: Behind Her Eyes (2021). Netflix.

Wooh-hoo! This is a great one for the Halloween season, if you like really scary psychological thrillers that turn out (spoiler alert) to have a bit of a supernatural twist to them. We binged it in a few days, because it is riveting and addictive, even though you know as the plot unfolds that there is something deeply sinister and scary going on.

Behind Her Eyes, the Netflix six-part mini-series, is based on a 2017 thriller by Sarah Pinborough (which I haven’t read). It begins with our introduction to Louise, an attractive but recently divorced black single mother in London (played convincingly by Simona Brown). Louise is just getting by, trying to take care of herself and her pre-teen son, while living in a small apartment on a modest salary, and working a clerical job.

One night, at a friend's urging, Louise goes to a bar, where she runs into a tall handsome Scotsman (Tom Bateman). They end up talking, and on the way out the door after too many drinks, they share an impulsive but passionate kiss – there’s definitely chemistry there, as well as the alcohol effects. Will they end up in bed together, as we might expect?  But then the man stops, mumbles something about “I can’t do this”, and runs off.

Of course, when she gets to work the next day, she discovers her unfortunate mistake from the night before is her new boss at the psychiatric clinic where she works. It's very embarrassing, but let’s all be grown-ups about this, shall we? And of course, he’s married. 

Soon we meet the wife (played chillingly by Eve Hewson), and start learning her backstory, which seems to involve great family wealth, and a tragic fire, but also a history of serious psychiatric problems. And we also will soon meet a strange lower class male drug addict friend of hers (Robert Aramayo), who she knew and bonded with as friends while they were both in rehab.

That’s as much plot as I can give away. As we are inexorably drawn into their webs of love and hate, friendship and deceit, and admiration and envy, the relationships become increasingly dangerous and fraught. We’re never sure who the evil one(s) are, who the victims are, and what any of the characters’ real motivations and personalities will prove to be. We only see that their relationship decisions and moral choices keep being the wrong ones, the ones that will lead inevitably to conflict and disaster.

It’s one of those “slow motion train wreck coming” shows, rich in well-drawn character flaws and a sense of impending doom, but which is also fascinating and intriguing, as you try to figure out the mysteries and behaviors of each of the characters, and where it’s all leading. And it is definitely also a good mystery story, with unexplained crimes and secrets lurking in the background.

It's an excellent piece of entertainment, very well crafted, with fine acting from all four of the leads, if your nerves can stand the psychological strain. And I can almost guarantee that you won't figure it all out until the very ending. Highly recommended.

Personal Note: A New Song, and New Video!

Oh my -- it's Thursday already, and I haven't done a single post to The Memory Cache all week. It's okay, though, I hope -- I haven't gone anywhere, and I do have several new books and shows I'm ready to review, which I will get back to within the next couple of days.

But as I mentioned recently, I've been heavily focused this late summer and early fall on recording and preparing a number of new songs for release, a process which I've now chosen to make more labor intensive, but also even more artistically rewarding, by taking on the challenge of making my own music videos to go with my songs.

I learned enough about video editing and production by making the lyric video for Brand New Driver last summer to be able to at least provide a pleasing background for displaying the words of the song in a music video, but this time I wanted to see if I could actually create a visual presentation of the song's story, in music video format.

Today you can actually check out the results of my experiments. This morning, I released my latest rock single, Canadian Girl, on all music streaming services, along with not one but two Canadian Girl music videos on YouTube. They are essentially the same video, but the official lyric version includes the lyrics on screen for those who want to read along with the song.

If you follow the link on the bottom right side of this page to my YouTube music video channel, you can see both new videos, along with the others I've released since I started this mad post-retirement rock musical adventure. I hope you like the new song and video, a musical tale of young summer romance with a glockenspiel in it!  And I'll be back with new reviews here shortly.

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: Life and Death at Cape Disappointment: Becoming a Surfman on the Columbia River Bar (2021). Christopher J. D’Amelio with Reid Maruyama.

I discovered this unusual and worthwhile memoir last year in a charming little bookstore in Ilwaco, Washington, on a vacation to the southwest Washington coast. That was probably more than coincidence, since most of the action in this intriguing story of a Coast Guard surfman takes place in and around that same small town of Ilwaco, and at the Coast Guard lifeboat station nearby at Cape Disappointment.

Christopher J. D’Amelio was a 19-year old California surfer and swimmer when he enlisted in the Coast Guard in 1995. In the course of beginning to tell his story about his life in the Coast Guard, he talks briefly about why he enlisted, boot camp, the temporary disruptions to his personal life and his relationship to the sweetheart he eventually (and happily) married when he first joined, and his early tours and adventures aboard Coast Guard ships in Alaska and other dangerous areas.

But the heart of his story is about the decade and a half or so he spent at Cape Disappointment in the early 2000s, the last point of land on the southern Washington coast that ends at the mouth of the great Colombia River, where the river flows into the Pacific Ocean. This coastal area has often been called “the graveyard of the Pacific” for its uniquely destructive combination of high winds, waves, surf, tides, and shoals. Since the beginnings of recorded maritime history, hundreds of vessels have sunk just offshore, and the sea has claimed many lives in the process.

For precisely this reason, the U.S. Coast Guard chose this challenging location to create its training school for surfmen – the elite small boat operators whose job it is to brave the worst weather and conditions, and to captain tiny motor lifeboats (from 23 to about 5o feet long) through rain, wind, huge waves and various sorts of disasters, to save lives and where possible bring stranded ships in to safety and calm waters. This was the role for which the author volunteered and was chosen, and after detailing the rigorous selection and training challenges he faced, he takes us along for a ride on some of his most daring and almost unbelievable rescue "cases".

Of all the military services of the United States, I’ve long felt that the Coast Guard is both the most under-appreciated, and the most inspirational. Their mission above all others is to save lives rather than to take them, and many of their members do this crucial function for the rest of us, day and day out, for years and decades, often under the most horrifyingly dangerous conditions.

As a result, a number of their technical specialties are particularly and almost unimaginably daring to most of us, including their storm-trained helicopter and C-13o pilots, and especially their famous rescue swimmers, who routinely jump out of helicopters into freezing oceans into terrible storm conditions, without much more than a dry suit, a mask, a knife and a pair of flippers to keep them alive while they pull people out of the water and off sinking ships and oil platforms.

The surfmen are in a similar category of bravery and skill. D’Amelio describes the physical danger aboard these tough little covered lifeboats, the huge towering waves, ferocious winds, and the pounding that shakes the crews' bodies to their cores, while they still need to constantly and carefully control engine power and steering to prevent being capsized or swamped by every passing monster wave set. But he doesn’t brag – it’s just what he did, and it is clear it was a passion and a mission for him, one that he felt called to do, and generally enjoyed.

Very much to his credit, he also talks wisely in retrospect about the toll that this “always on call” dangerous work takes on a marriage and family life. He also talks about the difficult form of guilt that he and his colleagues always carry about every life they tried but failed to save. You would think that these men and women might be well content with the number of hair-raising rescues they've performed that did succeed, and the many lives they’ve saved, but oddly it seems that it is the few failures that seem to weigh on them the most, long after the glory of each amazing rescue exploit is behind them.

The author talks honestly and openly about all that, in a way that made the connection for me to all our first responders who take on the role of protecting others, and who often suffer from lingering psychological burdens as a consequence of adversity and losses they experience that are beyond their control. It should make us all value what these first responders do that much more, and be grateful for their willingness to serve, but particularly for those who routinely put their own lives at risk to do it.

This is an excellent first-hand account of what Coast Guard surfmen and their fellows do for the public all over the country, how they do it, and what it costs them. They train in Washington state, but of course they are deployed around the whole country and its coasts, wherever rough ocean conditions or storms occur. I would imagine they’re on duty in Florida today, in the wake of Ian, the latest massive hurricane to hit that region. I hope they’re all staying safe, but of course that’s not in their job description. Highly recommended.

Movie Review: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin’ Down a Dream (2007). Peter Bogdanovich.

Among the most prized DVD sets in my musical film collection is Peter Bogdanovich's Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin' Down a Dream, a 4-disc set that includes a documentary spanning 2 of the discs, plus a full-length concert video DVD of a special live performance the band played in Gainesville, Florida, their original hometown, to celebrate the 30-year anniversary of the band's formation, and a CD containing rare and unreleased songs.

Most of my friends and family know that Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers has been one of my all-time favorite rock bands since the 1980s. I "discovered" them a little late -- by the time I first listened to their music in the late '80s, they had already been making great records and building a huge following for more than ten years. But since then, I have followed them avidly, right through the release of the band's last studio album, Hypnotic Eye, in 2014, and Petty's sad death at the end of his "final" tour in 2017.

There are documentaries about many pop music bands and musical artists, which typically follow a similar format. Interviews (where possible) with the principals are interspersed with interviews with collaborators, mentors, fans, friends and family, along with snippets of live performances, and maybe some footage from studio recording sessions as well.

Bogdanovich's massive compilation follows this same formula, but it stands out as one of the best and most exhaustive such efforts I've seen. Much of its success, which included a limited theatrical release, can be attributed to the fact that Bogdanovich is a major filmmaker and creative artist in his own right, who brought his talent, resources and vast experience to the project. It was also clearly a labor of love -- there's not much doubt that Bogdanovich was also a huge fan of Petty and the remarkable group of close friends and musical collaborators that surrounded him.

The documentary takes us back to the beginning. It covers Petty's family life as a child, including his loving and supportive mother, and his rocky relationship with his father, his discovery of rock music as a young teenager, and how the band members found each other. In telling this story, we hear interviews with Petty, and all the other band members, along with family members, friends and other musicians.

From this point on, we get a very detailed and complete history of every stage of the band's history, from their Gainesville years, the move to Los Angeles, their first recordings and record contracts, live performances, tours, personnel changes, and ups and downs, through the end of the documentary period in 2007. And the interviews keep bringing in surprising new friends and admirers to the tale, including Stevie Nicks, Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder, George Harrison, Roger McGuinn, Jackson Browne, and many other celebrities and music industry luminaries whose lives crossed paths with Petty and the band, and were deeply affected by it.

I'm sure this documentary is too long and detailed to be of general interest to everyone, but for the many fans and enthusiasts who have followed and loved the music of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, this is the definitive visual and musical account of their amazing career as one of the best and longest-enduring rock and roll acts of all time. I haven't checked, but it may be available to borrow through local libraries, and of course it can also be bought online. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Wild Tales: A Rock and Roll Life (2013). Graham Nash.

I saw an article this morning in The Seattle Times about an upcoming small venue local solo concert by Graham Nash, now 80 years old, who (for those who haven’t heard of him) is a famous surviving member of two of the great bands of the 1960s and 1970s, and a two-time inductee in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Since it’s once again Rock and Roll Friday here at The Memory Cache, I thought I’d take the opportunity to review his 2013 autobiography, which I read recently.

I’ll jump ahead in the story, to provide some context for those readers who don’t know: Nash first gained fame in the mid-1960s as a singer, guitarist, songwriter and founder of the Hollies, one of the more popular “British Invasion” bands, whose songs regularly soared to the top of the international charts, along with those of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.  A sample of their greatest hits would include songs like "Bus Stop", "Carrie-Anne", "Look Through Any Window", and "On a Carousel".

Nash was particularly well known for his signature high harmonies and vocal leads in many of the Hollies’ hits. But after years of rock stardom, he tired of the band’s formulaic sound and songwriting, so he moved to southern California, where in the late 1960s, he became a founding member of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (CSNY).

In Wild Tales, Nash takes us all the way back to his childhood, growing up in a slum neighborhood in Manchester, England. He talks about how he found his way to music, and the influences from late 1950s American rock, and the popular artists in England at the time that led to his love of harmony singing. He describes the formation of the Hollies, and sets it in the context of the other bands in England at the time that were vying for popularity and opportunities to perform. He also relates his family life and formative experiences, and how he came to his lifelong passion for photography, which has led him to acclaim for his visual art in addition to his storied musical career.

Nash doesn’t hold back in describing the people, places and events he experienced as a member of the Hollies, and then later in CSNY. His memories of the CSNY era are particularly salacious and gossipy. This legendary “super-group” of four established rock stars from other famous bands, with their unique complex vocal harmonies, massively popular rock hits and anthems of the Boomer generation, along with their drug use, sexual exploits, and larger than life friendships with other rockers and celebrities, has always been renowned for the instability of its internal relationships within the band, driven by gigantic egos, sudden wealth and their increasingly erratic personal behaviors as their celebrity and musical fame skyrocketed.

Nash takes us along for the full ride, not only at the moments of their greatest success, but also through their later years of repeated band reunions, break-ups, tragedies, new projects and awards. He shares details and stories about his various personal relationships with women, including groupies, his wives, and his famous but brief romance with Joni Mitchell in the late 1960s in Laurel Canyon, which he immortalized both in songs and in his photography. He also opens up about the ups and downs of his friendships, including with several of his Hollies band-mates, and with David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Neil Young, and others from the pantheon of classic rock superstars.

This is definitely a “tell all” book, which should appeal to fans and historians of the age of rock and roll, as told by one of the most successful and long-lasting musical and artistic voices of the era. It’s not the most beautifully written autobiography I’ve read, but it is honest, authentic and enlightening. 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.