MixedNPR... by the end of it you get the sense that [Kaiser] is more concerned with her own legacy than reckoning with any wrongdoing of her own part ... Kaiser gets in her own digs at Wylie here — all of which is: 1. Fun, if you, like me, love petty beefs, but 2. A bit disheartening all around ... what Targeted offers that other Cambridge Analytica look-backs don\'t is a more in-the-room account of what exactly, she alleges, was in the Powerpoint pitch deck ... Where the book is less concrete is when it comes to Kaiser\'s own reckoning with how dangerous Cambridge Analytica actually was. Unlike the Wylie book, Kaiser cops to being swept up in the romance of it all ... There\'s a victim-blamey tone here coming from someone who knows all too well the obfuscating language of terms of service, and it sidesteps the issue that it was Cambridge Analytica using this ethically suspect data ... Kaiser is something of an advocate for data and privacy rights these days. But if that\'s to be her legacy over her work with Cambridge Analytica, it\'s going to take a lot more than this book to get there.
Christopher Wylie
MixedNPRThere are some perfunctory lines in his memoir that show regret and remorse for what his work would eventually lead to, but the real juice of the book comes whenever Wylie comes across a new toy to scrape data with ... You almost wish Wylie committed fully to the heel turn, and really opened up about the allure this very specific kind of power trip had on him. The mentions he makes here and there to earnestly believing that he was working on a tool for good are hard to take at face value considering: 1. he\'s a smart guy! and 2. even after leaving Cambridge Analytica, he was still helping a pro-Brexit campaign market itself ... he stops short of really coming clean with himself, and saves that vulnerability for the details he lets out about his relationship with his Cambridge Analytica Boss, Alexander Nix ... Mindf*ck is worth reading if you\'re interested in some of the bigger questions of the day: elections; data; Russia\'s involvement in all of this; Steve Bannon\'s power plays in global politics; the list of politicians who make an appearance at the Cambridge Analytica offices. Less so, if you\'re hoping to get a completely unsparing and honest mea culpa from a guy who seems to genuinely love people, albeit more as an abstract idea.
Dale Beran
PositiveNPRBeran\'s a writer and cartoonist who got a lot of attention for a 2017 piece he published on Medium titled 4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump. The majority of his new book is an expansion of that ... There\'s less of a focus on [Beran] in the book. Instead he opts for an empathetic distance, like a guy explaining how his crew from high school lost touch over the years ... It\'s a disappointing omission. It might\'ve helped illuminate his underlying point: Economic inequality has made us all feel impotent and searching for an identity, so we glom onto a reality imposed on us via screens ... But avoiding that personal touch helps him avoid the trap of making false equivalences between chosen identities ... Beran makes a convincing argument that we\'re all caught up in simulations of political change rather than actually affecting it ... If Beran\'s to be believed, all the world\'s an Internet forum. The mods aren\'t asleep, they\'re just out at the movies, leaving the goons free to do their work.
