Scott Malcomson’s recent book Splinternet. How Geopolitics and Commerce are Fragmenting the World Wide Web is a great piece of contemporary history. Its aim is nothing less than to tell the story of the Internet – giving credit both to technology and politics, eccentric individuals and the anarchic cyberspace counter-culture of the 1980s.
To read the rest of the review, visit Netopia.
The warring sides have been egged on by outside powers, turning the Syrian theater into a microcosm of a global conflict, a “free-for-all in which everyone pursues his own interests to the detriment of the Syrians themselves.” Overlaying local resentments and divisions, the U.S. squares off against Russia; the Sunni theocracies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar take on the Shiite theocrats of Iran; and Turkey clashes with Arab nationalists over the attempted restoration of Turkey’s pre-WWI dominance. “External support has not merely escalated the killing,” Glass writes, “but made it ever more personal and vicious.”
To read the rest of the article, visit Hurriyet Daily News.
Narco History, a timely, insightful, and passionately argued short volume, is essential reading to understand why both Mexico and America have been ravaged for over a century by cartels, politicians, and gangs. The authors aren’t starry-eyed about legalization (although they support it) because they fear that drug cartels, such as Guzman’s Sinaloa, could become corporations and sell marijuana or other drugs legally on the market. What’s required for a wholesome change in Mexico’s dysfunctional political structure is “a complete dismantling of the anti-drug regime.” Tragically, at present, there’s too much money to be made for the war to stop.
To read the rest of the review, visit the LA Review of Books.
Debuting today is the latest episode of the popular podcast THE HIGHERSIDE CHATS, in which host Greg Carlwood conducts a two-hour-long interview with Yours Truly regarding the High Weirdness documented in my book CHAMELEO: A STRANGE BUT TRUE STORY OF INVISIBLE SPIES, HEROIN ADDICTION AND HOMELAND SECURITY. This conversation encompasses such conspiratorial subjects as the San Bernardino mass shootings, the recent attacks on Brussels, the connections between Hollywood and the intelligence community, cutting edge cloaking technology, acoustic weaponry deployed against U.S. citizens, the psychological warfare uses of holographic landscapes, and epic food fights with the Feds.
To listen to the interview, visit The Higherside Chats.
Reading this grim account, it’s hard to disagree with Glass’ conclusion that Americans are “policymaking adolescents” — a view strengthened by historical parallels that Washington ignored and Glass draws with Syria’s uprising against the French in 1925. Or the implosion of Lebanon in 1975. Or vacillations in U.S. policy that long predate the Obama administration.
To read the rest of the review, visit Monterey Herald.
Where is the line between observation and surveillance?
Observation is a desire to see something beautiful or good, while surveillance represents the desire to find something dreadful and stigmatize it. Writers believe in observation, while governments trust in surveillance. And we writers observe everything, including governments, while goverments keep us under surveillance.
To read the rest of the interview, visit PEN America.
Airbnb’s marketing still plays on the feelings of virtuous and adventurous sociability in the idea of a “guest” staying in a spare room of the “host’s” home. Yet, as Tom Slee’s superbly argued book points out, the vast majority of Airbnb’s business is now “entire home” rentals: self-contained flats or villas. Long-term renters in cities such as San Francisco are being forced out by landlords who see more profit in short-term Airbnb stays. Slee performs some very clever data research and finds out that the most expensive Airbnb apartment in Rome is one of several European luxury pads rented out by an American tech entrepreneur, who bought them with the proceeds of the sale of his last software company. The idea of “sharing” is as meaningless here as it is in Uber’s made-up concept of “ride-sharing”, which sounds as ecologically minded as “car-sharing” but actually describes a taxi service. Nor is any “sharing” going on with companies such as TaskRabbit, in which people bid to perform other people’s odd jobs.
To read the rest of the review, visit The Guardian.
In some cases, internet sovereignty can mean a state protecting its citizens’ privacy against international corporate surveillance or infiltration by another state. In other cases, it can mean the state ensuring that it can invade the privacy of its citizens whenever and however it likes. The choices made depend on the state, but that of course is the point: it’s the state that decides. Was this inevitable? Perhaps.
To read the rest of the article, visit The Guardian.
To capture the city so thoroughly though is a feat in and of itself. Just as with Sönmez’s novel, Istanbul defies being pinned down due to its multitudes. Yet Sönmez indelibly captures parts of the city and its inhabitants’ psyche. He describes the curse of “development” in the city that caused “houses …[to] presume to grow vertically in floors and block out the sky” and “square[s to be]… crushed beneath giant shadows” and how most people in the city loved crowds, as that was where “The beauty of the city lay”. Sönmez simply gets what it means to loathe and love the city, which is one large part of what the novel argues makes one an İstanbullu.
To read the rest of the review, visit Ploughshares.
Extinction frightens me—wait, I said that already, forgive me, I’ve been applying anaesthetics, okay—Dawson’s take is real, urgent, vital. It makes me face that I prefer my ecological criticism couched in the fantasy of the fantasy-past (Mononoke) or the doomed-but-hey-maybe-not-so-doomed-future (I’ll call here on Mononoke’s twin, Miyazaki’s 1984 epic Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, as an example). But prefer is not the right mode/verb here (and neither is the spirit of this riff, a solipsistic navel-gazing blog of myself). This failure is my failure.
To read the rest, visit Biblioklept.
The implicit premise of this valuable book is that “we study the past to understand the present; we understand the present to guide the future.” In that light, the book makes a valuable contribution by offering a sound and detailed historical survey of aspects of the Internet which are not well-known nor easily accessible outside the realms of dedicated internet research. However, as explained below, the author has not covered some important aspects of the past and thus the work is incomplete as a guide to the future. This should not be taken as criticism, but as a call for the author, or other scholars, to complete the work.
To read the rest of the review, visit boundary2.
“In my opinion, human-like consciousness would at least be a way to ensure that the AI valued the same things that humans do. Of course, we would need to be careful that the AI is not psychotic, and again this is where I think engineering something like the psychedelic state in silicon – or whatever computing medium we ultimately use – would be very beneficial.
“Interestingly, it seems that some of the popular fear about AI is that it would develop consciousness and suddenly turn evil for some reason.
“To me, the greater danger is some unconscious superintelligent AI system that has control over safety-critical systems like hospitals or air traffic and without any malicious intent (indeed it would have no intentions of its own) cause massive destruction because of some unintended consequence of its blind pursuit of the goals humans have programmed into it.”
To read the rest of the interview, visit The Irish Times.
Why has half the planet’s wildlife disappeared over the last 40 years? Why are we losing approximately 100 species every day? The answer, Dawson argues, lies not in the proximate drivers of extinction (deforestation, habitat fragmentation, poaching, overfishing, and climate change) but in the nature of capitalism itself.
To read the rest of the review, visit the Los Angeles Review of Books.
In city after city, debates surrounding ridesharing services are playing out, with Uber front and center. The debates are about many things: they are about us as consumers, but also us as citizens, and us as employees; they are about the role of government and the responsibilities of business.
To read the rest of the excerpt, visit Alternet.
I think journalists kid themselves when it comes to people giving them information. Nobody tells you something without a reason. I think journalists have always thought they were more in charge of things than they were really: they weren’t really investigators or spies, they were messengers.
To read the rest of the interview, visit VICE.
As Scott Malcomson writes in “Splinternet”, an illuminating survey of the past and future of the internet, [the internet] was developed “by the US military to serve US military purposes”. In fact, nearly every technology that makes smartphones so delightful started life as a tool of war. The Washington naval treaty, signed soon after the first world war to limit the size of warships, was silent on the matter of weaponry; that provided the impetus to develop machines capable of the complex mathematical calculations required to aim and fire guns accurately. The attack on Pearl Harbour spurred what would become the first computer with an operating system. The computer screen came from the need for radar-tracking screens.
To read the rest of the review, visit The Economist.
High-powered technology executives delivering quantitative claims in an authoritative and confident tone, in polished marketing language, can go a long way to creating that picture of an irresistible sunny future. By the time the truth surfaces, the damage is done.
To read the rest of the article, visit Jacobin.
To watch the full interview, visit RT.
The unavoidable lesson is that only a complete cessation of external political and military interference in the region can create the space for democratic renewal and the creation of functioning states based on popular sovereignty.
To read the rest of the review, visit Morning Star.
Cyberfeminists had banked on women being able to use new technologies to achieve their own ends, but capitalism has delivered a tech industry that uses them instead. Nor does it use us gently. The women who contributed to Lean Out write with palpable dismay that the latter-day capital of technological innovation has become a sort of sexist hellscape—even though any enterprising female geek must, of necessity, be drawn to Silicon Valley like a moth to a Zippo Lighter app.
To read the rest of the review, visit Bookforum.
The race between advertisers and publishers centers on creating content that grabs our attention while hiding its corporate sales pitch. It is “black ops advertising,” and it is the purposeful masking of corporate bias by either the advertiser or the publisher so that we can’t discern the underlying perspective — is it an ad? Is it an article? Can it be both? Was the article I read this morning paid for by Apple? Was that BuzzFeed quiz a promotion? Is that post on Facebook “organic,” or did a marketer pay for me to see it?
To read the rest of the excerpt, visit Smashpipe.
To listen to the program, visit the BBC. Patrick Cockburn’s interview begins 31 minutes in.
To read the rest of the review, visit The New York Review of Books.
To read the full excerpt, visit Alternet.
Now Myles is older than Lowell when he died, and enjoying her greatest moment of accomplishment and fame. Her very presence in the world is a form of activism, but her work, when studied with care, is also political in the sense that it gives evidence of one of the richest and most conflicted human hearts you’re likely to find. When, many years from now, she passes away, may she be elegized rudely by some brat clearing the nettles from her path, just the way she did with Lowell (and, in a more complex gesture, with Schuyler). This kind of schoolyard insult—“The guy was a loon”—is almost hilariously transparent as an expression of desire, and it is part of what the art’s all about.
To read the rest of the review, visit The New York Review of Books.
You critique solutions that you see as bad or inadequate. One of these criticisms is of “re-wilding”, where predators that were once thought of as a threat are re-introduced in order to benefit the whole ecosystem.
I think re-wilding offers people hope in a hopeless time. As global negotiations around climate change seem more and more deadlocked, something like re-wilding seems very exciting. I talk about the way it tries to wind time backwards, and there is something redemptive about that.
But there are problems: how far are we going to wind time backwards by reintroducing these keystone species? Do we want to go to the moment before Europeans arrived in a place like America? Well, there are problems with that because there were already people there who maintained the land in a certain way – it wasn’t “pristine” in the way settler-colonials envisaged it.
My real foundational critique is a pretty basic one. A lot of the celebrations of re-wilding are about bringing back areas in the global north while the decimation of so-called biodiversity hotspots in the global south pick up speed. What’s the point of working on a place like Oostvaardersplassen in Holland – where the Dutch government’s trying to re-introduce this ancient version of oxen – while the governments of the global north are unwilling to protect much more important areas in the south?
To read the rest of the review, visit Vice.
In What’s Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy, Tom Slee, an author and blogger who also works in the software business, delivers a smart and searing critique of a business that people are only just beginning to think about in a serious way. While some bloggers still treat the sharing economy as some kind of cause, Slee rightly analyses it as a business model masquerading as a movement.
To read the rest of the review, visit The Spectator.
The Decameron is frequently referenced in Burhan Sönmez’s novel “Istanbul Istanbul.” Like in Boccacio’s great work, the characters tell stories to pass the time. Unlike the Decameron, that time is spent in an underground jail cell in Istanbul, where prisoners are held between sessions of extreme torture. Each of the 10 chapters is narrated by one of the inmates, trying to distract themselves from pain and the terror of coming abuse. The exact era in which the book is set is left ambiguous, but it is some point within the last few decades.
To read the rest of the review, visit Hurriyet Daily.
To read the full post, visit Lithub.
To watch the interview, visit Inc..
