PositiveNew York Review of BooksThe depersonalization on display here is a welcome corrective to the overpersonalized way that history is typically written for a general audience ... At times, however, Harris overcorrects ... While his theoretical pronouncements can be mechanistic, the story itself is layered and nuanced. At its best, Palo Alto reads like a big social novel in the tradition of John Dos Passos ... Harris has given us nothing less than a new way of looking at Silicon Valley and its lineages ... But completeness can also be a curse, and Palo Alto would be a better book if it aspired to be less comprehensive.
Nick Bilton
MixedThe Wall Street JournalDrawing on an impressive stockpile of research, Mr. Bilton documents Ulbricht’s mental state in great detail, producing a portrait of a young man experiencing the heady mix of exhilaration and terror that accompanies becoming an immensely successful criminal ... Yet all of Ulbricht’s crimes—and much of Mr. Bilton’s story—took place online. This presents problems for a book that bills itself as a thriller and that probably aspires to be made into a film ... Without [discussing the] technology, however, the book feels incomplete. It’s hard to understand how Ulbricht succeeded and what lessons his story holds for the future.
Tim Wu
MixedThe GuardianWu is no technological determinist. While he acknowledges that the invention of radio, television and the internet created enormous new potential for attention capture, he’s careful to point out that there was nothing inevitable about that potential being fulfilled. Just because new tools made it easier to reach more people didn’t guarantee people would pay attention ... Wu’s book isn’t just a history. It’s a polemic. The reason we need to understand where the attention industry comes from, he believes, is because it poses a mortal threat to human happiness and flourishing. It does this by inhibiting good attention, and encouraging bad attention...This is an ancient complaint, and a rather silly one. Every media innovation since the invention of writing has triggered a moral panic about whether the human experience would be hopelessly corrupted as a result ... There are few people more qualified than him to perform a nuanced analysis of online attention capture. Instead, he devotes the last 50 pages of his book to denouncing Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and BuzzFeed for destroying the internet...Wu sees contemporary digital life as wholly, irredeemably corrupt. As a result, it’s nearly impossible to recognise the actual internet in his cartoonish portrait.
