PositiveBookforumIts casual and quiet tone is reminiscent of the intimacy that characterized these early online chat rooms. The result feels like a small exhibition, full of pleasing digressions and well-curated associations. Some of the stories here will feel familiar to anyone who has read (or read reviews of) prior accounts of once-vibrant internet communities. But Lurking is more than a ghost tour. By attending to the Web’s neglected history, McNeil wants us to imagine how things might have been—and might still be—otherwise ... Yet though McNeil’s account is largely elegiac in tone, she guards against the lure of nostalgia.
Roger McNamee
MixedBookforum\"[The book\'s] historical approach allows McNamee to draw valuable connections between present-day troubles and the company’s philosophical source code ... The time line of Facebook’s transgressions that McNamee supplies will be familiar to readers of the news. More interesting is what the book reveals, at times unintentionally, about the utopian worldview of the company’s enablers ... [McNamee] overlooks the industry’s contributions to global inequality, its environmental impact, and its exploitative labor practices ... An optimist might say that McNamee has set himself up for a sequel, one in which he eventually comes to discover that the whole industry, and not just Facebook, is fucked.\
Bruno LaTour
PositiveThe New York Times MagazineAn illuminating and counterintuitive analysis of the present post-truth moment ... extends the sociological analysis that he brought to bear on factory workers in Abidjan and scientists in California to the minds of anti-scientific voters, looking at the ways in which the reception of seemingly universal knowledge is shaped by the values and local circumstances of those to whom it is being communicated.
