About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Shoshana Zuboff
Mixed Los Angeles Review of Books A long, sprawling book ... While Zuboff’s assessment of the costs that people incur under surveillance capitalism is exhaustive, she largely ignores the benefits people receive in return — convenience, customization, savings, entertainment, social connection, and so on. The benefits can’t be dismissed as illusory, and the public can no longer claim ignorance about what’s sacrificed in exchange for them ... a full examination of surveillance capitalism requires as rigorous and honest an accounting of its boons as of its banes ... Zuboff is prone to wordiness and hackneyed phrasing, and she at times delivers her criticism in overwrought prose that blunts its effect. A less tendentious, more dispassionate tone would make her argument harder for Silicon Valley insiders and sympathizers to dismiss. The book is also overstuffed. Zuboff feels compelled to make the same point in a dozen different ways when a half dozen would have been more than sufficient. Here, too, stronger editorial discipline would have sharpened the message ... Whatever its imperfections, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is an original and often brilliant work, and it arrives at a crucial moment, when the public and its elected representatives are at last grappling with the extraordinary power of digital media and the companies that control it ... challenges assumptions, raises uncomfortable questions about the present and future, and stakes out ground for a necessary and overdue debate. Shoshana Zuboff has aimed an unsparing light onto the shadowy new landscape of our lives. The picture is not pretty.
Siva Vaidhyanathan
Positive The Washington Post [A] full and rigorous accounting of Facebook’s sins. Much of the criticism will be familiar to anyone who has been following the news about the company. What distinguishes the book is Vaidhyanathan’s skill in putting the social media phenomenon into a broader context — legal, historical and political ... Vaidhyanathan’s criticism is sharp but even-handed. He debunks some of the more extreme claims about the influence of social media on public opinion ... Antisocial Media is not a hopeful book... [and] scholarly in tone.
Jaron Lanier
Mixed The Washington Post Although given to windiness, Lanier is an astute critic, able to see things others miss. But his analysis is distorted by a flawed assumption. He views the problems of social media as \'blessedly specific,\' resulting from Facebook’s and Google’s reliance on personalized advertising to make money. By closing our social media accounts, he contends, we’ll give Silicon Valley an opportunity \'to improve itself\'—to retool its business in a socially responsible way. That’s a cheery notion, but it’s naive to think that, if we just hit the reset button, Silicon Valley will reform itself and right its wrongs.
Jaron Lanier
Mixed Chicago Tribune Jaron Lanier\'s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now is cheeky ... Although given to windiness, Lanier is an astute critic, able to see things others miss. But his analysis is distorted by a flawed assumption ... it\'s naive to think that, if we just hit the reset button, Silicon Valley will reform itself and right its wrongs.
Abby Smith Rumsey
Positive The Washington Post Rumsey’s book poses a vital question: As more and more of what we know, make and experience is recorded as vaporous bits in the cloud, what exactly will we leave behind for future generations? ... Rumsey is clear about the dangers of our 'ephemeral digital landscape,' but she isn’t a doomsayer. She believes that we can protect our cultural legacy for our descendants, even if that legacy ends up mainly in the form of immaterial bits. But, she stresses, we’ll first need to overcome our complacency and start taking the long-term protection of valuable data seriously.