Review: The End of the World is Just the Beginning

Title: The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

Author: Peter Zeihan

Genre: Current Issues

Trigger Warnings: Death (mentions), climate crisis, existential dread, war, genocide (mentions), animal death (mentions), natural disasters

Back Cover:

2019 was the last great year for the world economy.

For generations, everything has been getting faster, better, and cheaper. Finally, we reached the point that almost anything you could ever want could be sent to your home within days – even hours – of when you decided you wanted it.

America made that happen, but now America has lost interest in keeping it going.

Globe-spanning supply chains are only possible with the protection of the U.S. Navy. The American dollar underpins internationalized energy and financial markets. Complex, innovative industries were created to satisfy American consumers. American security policy forced warring nations to lay down their arms. Billions of people have been fed and educated as the American-led trade system spread across the globe.

All of this was artificial. All this was temporary. All this is ending.

In The End of the World is Just the Beginning, author and geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan maps out the next world: a world where countries or regions will have no choice but to make their own goods, grow their own food, secure their own energy, fight their own battles, and do it all with populations that are both shrinking and aging.The list of countries that make it all work is smaller than you think. Which means everything about our interconnected world – from how we manufacture products, to how we grow food, to how we keep the lights on, to how we shuttle stuff about, to how we pay for it all – is about to change.

In customary Zeihan fashion, rather than yelling fire in the geoeconomic theatre, he narrates the accumulation of matchsticks, gasoline, and dynamite in the hands of the oblivious audience, suggesting we might want to call the fire department.

A world ending. A world beginning. Zeihan brings readers along for an illuminating (and a bit terrifying) ride packed with foresight, wit, and his trademark irreverence.

Review:

I don’t remember if I knew what this book was actually about when I put it on hold at the library. The library had a multi-month wait, and if I ever knew, by the time it was my turn for it I’d forgotten. I thought it was going to be about climate change.

The tone of this review is very calm, but after reading this, I am anything but. (Please picture me curled up in the corner and sobbing “It was supposed to be about climate change, it was supposed to be about climate change …”)

There is so much in this book. Economics, demographics, geography, politics, geopolitics, oil, shipping, transportation, global trade, energy, agriculture, manufacturing, military, industrialization, colonization … this is a book about how the world is ending and climate change doesn’t even come in until 89% of the way through. The world we know is in the process of ending and climate change isn’t even a major factor.

I knew the situation was dire in a vague, faraway sense. The only real threat I was aware of was climate change – where scientists can never seem to agree on how long it will take to kill us – and a vague concept of “unsustainability.” This book made it real. I didn’t realize how badly, how thoroughly, and how imminently the world is screwed. Climate change barely comes into play in this examination. There is so much more poised to go wrong – and it’s already started.

There are no solutions here. Peter gives us no advice and no ways forward. He just describes what’s happening, explains how we got here, and predicts what might happen and why. Many of the disasters in progress have already passed the point of repairability. The collapse of our current way of life is real, possible, and imminent. And yet the book is also vaguely hopeful, strangely. Our current way of life and many individuals won’t survive the upheavals, but humanity as a whole probably will. And if Peter’s predictions are right, the worst of it will be over in less than 30 years.

This book gave me a better understanding of economics, geopolitics, and the global supply chain. It shattered everything I thought I understood about clean energy. It made me rethink the future – both the world’s and my own. I’m terrified, but I simultaneously feel a little better about the end of the world. If I can’t do anything about it, at least I know what’s coming.

I don’t know where I, or the world, can go from here. What do you do when you learn the apocalypse has already started? I don’t think there are answers, and even if there are they sure aren’t in this book. Reading this won’t help you escape the coming apocalypse, but at least you’ll feel better informed along the way.

Review: The Righteous Mind

Title: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

Author: Jonathan Haidt

Genre: Philosophy/Current Issues

Trigger Warnings: Racism (mentions)

Back Cover:

Why can’t our political leaders work together as threats loom and problems mount? Why do people so readily assume the worst about the motives of their fellow citizens? In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding.

His starting point is moral intuition—the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right. He blends his own research findings with those of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to draw a map of the moral domain.

He then examines the origins of morality, overturning the view that evolution made us fundamentally selfish creatures. But rather than arguing that we are innately altruistic, he makes a more subtle claim—that we are fundamentally groupish. It is our groupishness, he explains, that leads to our greatest joys, our religious divisions, and our political affiliations. In a stunning final chapter on ideology and civility, Haidt shows what each side is right about, and why we need the insights of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians to flourish as a nation.

Review:

This book was recommended to me somewhere. Potentially it was mentioned in another book I read. I don’t really remember. I don’t really know what got me to check it out from the library, either. It may have just been random.

But regardless of why, I’m so glad I did. This is a spectacular, remarkable, eye-opening book. From the back cover, it sounds like a book about politics. It is, in a way, but it’s about so much more than that.

In less than four hundred pages, Jonathan covers a lot of ground. He covers the general idea of morality – how we conceptualize morality consciously and subconsciously, how human “moral minds” work, probable reasons why we evolved to have a moral sense in the first place, why different cultures end up with different moral values, how morality affects society. By far the most revolutionary concept of the book, though, is the moral foundations. He identifies six different foundational values that systems of morality can be built upon, and explains how placing varying levels of importance on each foundation can lead to different systems of morality. And relating to the political bent of the back cover, he goes over in detail how American liberals, American conservatives, and American libertarians give different priority to the six foundations, leading to each group thinking the other is not just politically stupid but morally corrupt.

It was fascinating, and it explains so much. I don’t like books about politics, and I enjoyed this because it’s not about politics – it’s about the foundations behind political beliefs. The fundamental disconnect between liberals and conservatives causing America’s extreme partisan politics just got thoroughly explained to me in this book. And honestly, I think I can see the other side’s point.

We humans have a tendency to get immediately and defensively furious when someone criticizes a group we belong to. And no matter where you are on the political spectrum, there will be something in this book that will get you irrationally angry. When that happens, stop reading and take some time to cool down if you need to. Because if you can get past that anger and really listen to what this book is saying, you’ll learn a ton. So many things will make so much more sense. You may even start to look at people with different views in a new light.

I hesitate to say that one book could single-handedly fix partisan divides. But if everyone read this book and understood the ideas, it might help make some major progress towards less partisan politics. If nothing else, it will help on an individual level.

I learned so much just reading this straight through without stopping to think or take notes. But this is the kind of book that I want to reread and reflect on. The emphasis is on politics, but the moral foundations can explain so much of the world. I feel like my eyes have been opened. I legit think I need to rethink my political positions … and moral thoughts … and lots of things.

Review: How to Be an Antiracist

Title: How to Be an Antiracist

Author: Ibram X. Kendi

Genre: Current Issues/Social Justice

Trigger Warnings: Racism, colorism, homophobia, hate crimes, sexism, cancer, racial slurs (minor)

Back Cover:

Antiracism is a transformative concept that reorients and reenergizes the conversation about racism—and, even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. At its core, racism is a powerful system that creates false hierarchies of human value; its warped logic extends beyond race, from the way we regard people of different ethnicities or skin colors to the way we treat people of different sexes, gender identities, and body types. Racism intersects with class and culture and geography and even changes the way we see and value ourselves. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas—from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilities—that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their poisonous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves.

Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science with his own personal story of awakening to antiracism. This is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond the awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a just and equitable society.

Review:

This book is intense and absolutely bursting with ideas about racism and anti-racism that I’ve never heard before.

In many ways it feels like a topical memoir, as the ideas contained are illustrated and expanded through the author’s life in a mostly-chronological order. Dr. Kendi discusses his struggles with external, systemic, and internalized racism, and to a lesser degree homophobia and sexism, and now reckoning with those forces led to these ideas.

This book heavily emphasizes definitions, with each topical chapter opening with a definition of a term. At first I thought that was kind of silly, because of course I know what racism is, otherwise why would I have picked up this book? But Dr. Kendi uses these definitions – and he defines these words much differently than I would have, and for good reasons which he explains – to tackle everything from intersectionality to the idea that Black people can’t be racist. The ideas he presents are radically different from most of what I’ve heard about race and racism, and the difference is eye-opening. He makes it clear why most movements against racism today have accomplished little to nothing.

In the early hours of reading this book, I was afraid this would have to go in my “the title promised me actionable things to do but it lied to me” pile, as it was focusing more on explaining what racism and anti-racism were more than how to be an anti-racist. But it gets there. Dr. Kendi wants to make sure we’re on the same page concerning the ideas he’s presenting, but once he’s sure of that he digs into the practical, actionable stuff. And don’t think you can skip over the first sections and go straight to the practical stuff, because the actionable items won’t make half as much sense if you don’t have the context built up in the earlier parts of the book.

This book is amazingly valuable. The perspectives on racism and anti-racism are much different than mainstream ideas about race and racial activism (or at least way different from the twenty-teens Tumblr social justice ideas where I was introduced to these things). I feel like my mind has been expanded, and of course I always appreciate actionable steps. This book and the radical ideas inside are absolutely worth reading.

Review: Sedated

Title: Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis

Author: James Davies

Genre: Current Issues

Trigger Warnings: Mental illness, poverty, suicide (mentions), self-harm (mentions), forced institutionalization (mentions)

Back Cover:

In Britain alone, more than 20% of the adult population take a psychiatric drug in any one year. This is an increase of over 500% since 1980 and the numbers continue to grow. Yet, despite this prescription epidemic, levels of mental illness of all types have actually increased in number and severity.

Using a wealth of studies, interviews with experts, and detailed analysis, Dr James Davies argues that this is because we have fundamentally mischaracterised the problem. Rather than viewing most mental distress as an understandable reaction to wider societal problems, we have embraced a medical model which situates the problem solely within the sufferer and their brain.

Urgent and persuasive, Sedated systematically examines why this individualistic view of mental illness has been promoted by successive governments and big business – and why it is so misplaced and dangerous.

Review:

About three years ago I had a revelation: Most of the “mental illnesses” I had been diagnosed with were perfectly normal reactions to shitty situations. My depression was mainly caused by on-and-off homelessness, the stress of working three jobs while going to college full-time, finally having the space to reckon with a pretty awful childhood, and my only “friend” being my abusive boyfriend. My Borderline Personality Disorder completely disappeared once I found some stable, non-abusive relationships. My brain chemistry wasn’t broken – I just had some really awful circumstances.

This book takes that idea and expands on it, with sources and studies. It focuses on the UK, but the ideas are very generalizable even if the NHS stats aren’t. James gives a brief history of mental health treatment and how mental health drugs were developed and advertised, the expansion of the DSM, stats on drug-based interventions’ effectiveness (spoiler: they aren’t), and so much more.

The basic idea boils down to this:

Horrible circumstances that seem impossible to escape will naturally make people feel down, hopeless, and/or worried. Capitalism by design puts many people in horrible, nearly-inescapable circumstances. Changing the system is hard and the people benefiting from it would rather you didn’t, so it’s much easier to diagnose these feelings of being down, hopelessness, and worry as disorders of personal brain chemistry, and it’s profitable to prescribe drugs to treat these symptoms.

So many books in this vein shy away from saying capitalism is the problem here, so I’m so glad Sedated has the guts to go there. It doesn’t just say that and leave it be, though – it backs it up with sources and research and studies. I cannot express how validating this book was for me, who had this revelation from personal experience but still can’t get any of my doctors to take Borderline Personality Disorder off my record (despite not having any of the symptoms anymore) because the diagnostic manual says BPD is incurable.

I highly recommend this book. It isn’t perfect by any stretch, but it’s still full of fascinating studies and sources on mental health, psychiatry, and psychiatric drugs. I agree with the premise that capitalism is the real problem here, but if you don’t (and this book doesn’t convince you), you can also read it as a solid argument for environmental factors in mental health issues. This is a very needed book.

Review: True Enough

Title: True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society

Author: Farhad Manjoo

Genre: Current Issues/Sociology

Trigger Warnings: Racial slurs (mentions), bigotry (mentions), death of children

Back Cover:

Why has punditry lately overtaken news? Why do lies seem to linger so long in the cultural subconscious even after they’ve been thoroughly discredited? And why, when more people than ever before are documenting the truth with laptops and digital cameras, does fact-free spin and propaganda seem to work so well? True Enough explores leading controversies of national politics, foreign affairs, science, and business, explaining how Americans have begun to organize themselves into echo chambers that harbor diametrically different facts—not merely opinions—from those of the larger culture.

Review:

I am really tired of these misleading titles (or subtitles, as the case may be) that promise something actionable but are really just about how and why things got this way (e.g. How to Do Nothing, anything by Malcolm Gladwell). This is not a book about “Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society,” it’s a book about how society got to the point where facts and reality are debatable.

It is a really fascinating piece of sociological work. How did we get to the point where scientists and experts nearly unanimously say that climate change is real and human-caused, but the public debate is not about what to do about it but whether these facts are actual facts? Farhad Manjoo explores ideological echo chambers, conspiracy theories, human psychology, and the perfect storm of modern society that puts even long-established facts like “the earth is round” up for debate.

It’s not at all a bad book. In fact, it is rather fascinating, and if you go in expecting to get a sociological study on why in the heck our society is like this, you’ll probably enjoy it immensely. I just went in expecting to learn how to live in a post-fact society, and that’s not at all what I got. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret the read and I learned a lot, but it was not what I expected.

Review: Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians But Were Afraid to Ask

Title: Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians But Were Afraid to Ask

Author: Anton Treuer

Genre: Current Issues/Society

Trigger Warnings: Discussions of native genocide, racism, poverty (mentions), alcoholism (mentions)

Back Cover:

“I had a profoundly well-educated Princetonian ask me, ‘Where is your tomahawk?’ I had a beautiful woman approach me in the college gymnasium and exclaim, ‘You have the most beautiful red skin.’ I took a friend to see Dances with Wolves and was told, ‘Your people have a beautiful culture.’ . . . I made many lifelong friends at college, and they supported but also challenged me with questions like, ‘Why should Indians have reservations?’ ”

What have you always wanted to know about Indians? Do you think you should already know the answers—or suspect that your questions may be offensive? In matterof-fact responses to over 120 questions, both thoughtful and outrageous, modern and historical, Ojibwe scholar and cultural preservationist Anton Treuer gives a frank, funny, and sometimes personal tour of what’s up with Indians, anyway.

• What is the real story of Thanksgiving?
• Why are tribal languages important?
• What do you think of that incident where people died in a sweat lodge?

White/Indian relations are often characterized by guilt and anger. Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians But Were Afraid to Ask cuts through the emotion and builds a foundation for true understanding and positive action.

Anton Treuer, author of The Assassination of Hole in the Day and many other books on Ojibwe history and language, received an Ambassador Award in 2011 from Facing Race: We’re All in This Together, an initiative of the St. Paul Foundation. All around Minnesota, Treuer has given scores of public lectures and been asked hundreds of questions—many like the ones in this book.

Review:

This is officially the 48th book I’ve completed in 2021, so not even halfway through the year and I’ve hit my total reading goal. Being able to listen to audiobooks at work is doing great things for my reading quantity this year!

I don’t have a lot to say about this book in particular. Like the title says, it answers a bunch of questions I had about Indians (whether or not that’s the correct term, it’s the one Anton uses in the book so it’s the one I’ll use in the review) but was afraid to ask for fear of them being offensive. Anton treats all the questions, even the ones that I would think were very offensive, like questions asked in good faith by well-intentioned but ignorant people, and answers them openly and honestly. And I did appreciate that. I wouldn’t say it answered all my questions about Indians, but it answered a lot of them.

Anton is Ojibwe, and he makes it clear that Indians are not a monolith and each nation and culture has differences and different opinions. He uses examples from Ojibwe culture in many places and mentions other nations’ differences here and there, but several times he answers questions with his own opinions and makes it clear that asking “what do Indians think about X?” is the same as asking “what do white people think about abortion?” – there’s a diversity of opinions.

This book really made me want to find out if the family legend about my great great grandmother being Sioux is true, and if so learn more about where she came from and that family history. Plus I feel more informed about Indian culture and concerns in general. So overall I’d say this book is a worthwile read.

Review: Being Mortal

Title: Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Author: Atul Gawande

Genre: Current Issues/Philosophy

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of parents, dying, aging, medical procedures, cancer

Back Cover:

Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury, and disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should.

Through eye-opening research and gripping stories of his own patients and family, Atul Gawande, a practicing surgeon, reveals the suffering this dynamic has produced. Nursing homes, devoted above all to safety, battle with residents over the food they are allowed to eat and the choices they are allowed to make. Doctors, uncomfortable discussing patients’ anxieties about death, fall back on false hopes and treatments that are actually shortening lives instead of improving them.

In his bestselling books, Gawande has fearlessly revealed the struggles of his profession. Now he examines its ultimate limitations and failures–in his own practices as well as others’–as life draws to a close. Riveting, honest, and humane, Being Mortal shows how the ultimate goal is not a good death but a good life–all the way to the very end.

Review:

This is a really interesting book, and though the topic of illness, aging, and inevitable death is not exactly one people like thinking about, Atul Gawande proposes that the process of dying would be a less horrible experience if we did think about them.

There are a lot of different examples covered in this book, from people interviewed for this book to people Atul has seen in his own practice as a surgeon to his own father’s process of dying. But everything really comes down to a few main ideas:

• You are 100% going to die eventually and it will likely be a process, so it’s essential to think about what you want and tell the people who will be making decisions for you when you’re incapacitated.
• The medical profession is more focused on solving individual problems than how those solutions will affect quality of life, even in terminal patients, and that’s something that should be changed.
• Elder care facilities like nursing homes are more focused on safety than supporting those people who need daily assistance to live the life they want, and that also should be changed.
• Every medical intervention comes with a quality of life tradeoff, and people who are terminal (whether from age or illness) and their families are usually happier and more satisfied if quality of life takes precidence over extending life.

Though at times the book felt a little longer than it needed to be and the tendency to start an example, move on to another one, and then go back to finish the first made it hard to follow at times (possibly exaggerated by the fact that I read this as an audiobook), this was a really good read. Not necessarily one that I enjoyed, but it was engaging and I think the topic is important.

I have been thinking about and preparing for my death for the last few years. I’m not terminally ill or elderly or anything, I just have a certainty (despite a complete lack of evidence) that I’m going to die at or before age 30. So these kinds of discussions don’t make me uncomfortable because I’ve been having them with myself and my husband fairly regularly. If you’re not prepared to face your own mortality, this book may make you very uncomfortable. But at the same time, it’s important to think about what trade-offs you’re willing to make and what things are non-negotiable for you. If it came down to “This surgery will save your life but you won’t be able to do X anymore,” is it worth it to you to live without X or would you rather focus on comfort care than live without X? These are the kinds of questions this book makes you consider.

It also makes you rethink nursing homes. If you’ve ever visited an older relative in a nursing home, looked for a nursing home for yourself or your parent(s), or happen to be like me and did nurse aide clinicals in a nursing home, you know nobody likes being there and they’re sad, depressing places full of sad old people waiting to die. And this book makes a good point that nursing homes focus on safety over agency – keeping the people alive at the cost of giving them any control over their lives, being an institution instead of “home” for the people who live there.

This review could get really long if I addressed every good point it made. It made a ton of them, and has a bunch of stuff worth talking about. Though it doesn’t really give advice for actually having these conversations (my husband really does not think, “Happy birthday! Now that you’re getting older, let’s talk about end-of-life wishes” is going to go over well), they’re essential.

Review: Teaching to Transgress

Title: Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

Author: bell hooks

Genre: Society/Social Justice

Trigger Warnings: Mentions of racism/sexism

Back Cover:

In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks–writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual–writes about a new kind of education, educations as the practice of freedom. Teaching students to “transgress” against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for hooks, the teacher’s most important goal.

Bell hooks speaks to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do about teachers who do not want to teach, and students who do not want to learn? How should we deal with racism and sexism in the classroom?

Full of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings. This is the rare book about teachers and students that dares to raise critical questions about eros and rage, grief and reconciliation, and the future o teaching its self.

“To educate as the practice of freedom,” writes bell hooks, “is a way of teaching that any one can learn.” Teaching to Transgress is the record of one gifted teacher’s struggle to make classrooms work.

Review:

Even though bell hooks is one of the great and famous Black feminist theorists, her works are far from what you’d expect from “feminist theory.” They’re engaging, wise, relatable, and full of truth I was never quite able to put into words.

This book is about education, specifically higher education – the existing system and methods, the experience of being a professor, different and better ways of teaching and facilitating learning, and how the education system fails marginalized students (especially Black women). This topic in itself is not inherently relatable to me. I am not and have never been a professor, have never taught anyone anything in a classroom setting, and for the most part I am the kind of student who excels under the existing college education system. I did, in fact, do excellently during my undergrad.

However, seeing bell hooks put into words not only the shortcomings of the current systems but tangible ways to make it better, I realized how much I missed out on. I’ve always felt like I never truly learned anything in school, I simply memorized what was put in front of me – and I was a wealthy white student, the kind of student the system works best for. I can’t even imagine how much more difficult it must have been for my working-class peers and peers of color.

Far from being about “just” education, though, this book also covers feminism, class, and race. It talks about how students often see plain “theory” as inaccessible and irrelevant to their lives, how to help marginalized students share their perspectives and help privileged students listen, and honoring different ways of knowing. It focuses on the experiences of marginalized students (especially Black students) in education, how the system fails them, and better ways to practice education.

The only parts I found difficult were some of the terms. I’m still not completely sure what “pedagogy” means, and bell hooks uses “theorizing” and “theory” in some contexts that confused me a little. I think this is my fault, though, because I’m pretty sure the terms were defined towards the beginning and I just took so long to read this book that I forgot.

Even though I’m not a teacher and probably won’t ever be one, this book was still intensely relatable and I feel like my eyes have been opened to new things. You don’t have to be a teacher or a student to get a lot out of this book.

I want to end with a few of my favorite quotes from this book – so much of it is very quotable, but these are a few that made me pause reading and save them for later.

… students, most of whom are female, come to Women’s Studies classes and read what they are told is feminist theory only to feel that what they are reading has no meaning, cannot be understood, or when understood in no way connects to “lived” realities beyond the classroom.

Pages 64-65

Black women are treated as though we are a box of chocolates presented to individual white women for their eating pleasure, so they can decide for themselves and others which pieces are most tasty.”

Page 80

[Discussing the value of lived personal experience in the classroom.] I share as much as possible the need for critical thinkers to engage multiple locations, to address diverse standpoints, to allow us to gather knowledge fully and inclusively. Sometimes, I tell students, it is like a recipe. I tell them to imagine we are baking bread that needs flour. And we have all the other ingredients but no flour. Suddenly the flour becomes most important even though it alone will not do.

Pages 91-92

It only took me a short while to understand that class was more than just a question of money, that it shaped values, attitudes, social relations, and the biases that informed the way knowledge would be given and received.

Page 178

Review: Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

Title: Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

Author: Jaron Lanier

Genre: Current Issues/Society

Trigger Warnings: Swearing, mention of medical procedures

Back Cover:

Jaron Lanier, the world-famous Silicon Valley scientist-pioneer who first alerted us to the dangers of social media, explains why its toxic effects are at the heart of its design, and explains in ten simple arguments why liberating yourself from its hold will transform your life and the world for the better.

In Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now Jaron Lanier draws on his insider’s expertise to explain precisely how social media works and why its cruel and dangerous effects are at the heart of its current business model and design. As well as offering ten simple arguments for liberating yourself from its addictive hold, his witty and urgent manifesto outlines a vision for an alternative that provides all the benefits of social media without the harm and become a nicer person in the process.

Review:

I watched The Social Dilemma a week or two ago and Jaron Lanier was one of the people being interviewed. His book was mentioned, so I found it online to give it a read. If you’re not familiar with The Social Dilemma, it’s a Netflix documentary about the downsides of big tech giants like Facebook and Google. It has interviews with former employees of those companies and experts in digital media interspersed with a little drama thing about how social media addiction tracks, manipulates, and eventually destroys a teen’s life.

I’m already predisposed to agree with the premise in The Social Dilemma and this book – I left an entire career in marketing due to realizing my whole goal as a marketer was to exploit all the data these platforms collect to manipulate people into buying whatever I’m selling. That said, Jaron Lanier is kinda nuts.

I took notes while reading. Here are some highlights:

• I think he was attempting to make the point that groupthink is bad, but the point he actually made was “being in a group will naturally make you mean and the only way you can be a good person is to be a self-sufficient individualist.”
  • This argument could also be read as “groupthink is bad, avoid it by avoiding groups.”
• How do you not be a troll online? Never interact with anyone ever.
• Frames all human relationships as inherently a power struggle.
• Claims trying to be a decent person online is like fighting gravity.
• (Are you feeling like this dude struggles to interact with people and/or is blaming social media for his inclination for becoming a troll online? Because I am.)
• Spends like two chapters talking about how Big Tech is stealing our free will, which had a very “but muh freedoms!” tone in my head.
• Defines “business” as “being about reality beyond social competitions.” (Direct quote from page 95.)
• Uses acronyms and code words that he made up so much that sometimes it feels like he’s deliberately trying to obscure what he’s talking about.
  • Or honestly it could just be that he was a Silicon Valley programmer for most if not all of his career and doesn’t see anything weird about naming his own variables as a kind of shorthand.
• 100% believes that capitalism and profit motive aren’t the problem here, the problem is just that the big tech companies picked the wrong way to make money. (It’s never really clear what he thinks is the right way, though.)
• Thinks just deleting your social media accounts will eventually fix the problem.

So yeah. I think the dude is a little crazy and also most likely doesn’t understand how most humans relate to each other. I agree with his general premise (that deleting your social media accounts is probably better for you in the long run), but I already agreed with it before I picked up this book. Even agreeing with it already, it’s not very convincing and feels a bit more like a personal rant than a persuasive argument.

That said, though, there is some really interesting stuff in here. Mainly about the inner workings of the Silicon Valley giants, which he knows a lot about because he worked (works?) there and helped develop some of the technology he’s now complaining about. Though I can’t say he convinced me to delete my Reddit account (which is the only social media I use on a regular basis), I did learn some things. And if all else fails, at least his crazy arguments are entertaining.

Review: Backlash

Title: Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

Author: Susan Faludi

Genre: Current Issues/Feminism

Trigger Warnings: Spousal abuse/intimate partner violence, sexism, misogyny, sexual assault (mentions), rape (mentions), gender discrimination

Back Cover:

“Opting-out,” “security moms,” “desperate housewives,” “the new baby fever”—the trend stories of 2006 leave no doubt that American women are still being barraged by the same backlash messages that Susan Faludi brilliantly exposed in her 1991 bestselling book of revelations. Now, the book that reignited the feminist movement is back in a fifteenth anniversary edition, with a new preface by the author that brings backlash consciousness up to date.

When it was first published, Backlash made headlines for puncturing such favorite media myths as the “infertility epidemic” and the “man shortage,” myths that defied statistical realities. These willfully fictitious media campaigns added up to an antifeminist backlash. Whatever progress feminism has recently made, Faludi’s words today seem prophetic. The media still love stories about stay-at-home moms and the “dangers” of women’s career ambitions; the glass ceiling is still low; women are still punished for wanting to succeed; basic reproductive rights are still hanging by a thread. The backlash clearly exists.

With passion and precision, Faludi shows in her new preface how the creators of commercial culture distort feminist concepts to sell products while selling women downstream, how the feminist ethic of economic independence is twisted into the consumer ethic of buying power, and how the feminist quest for self-determination is warped into a self-centered quest for self-improvement. Backlash is a classic of feminism, an alarm bell for women of every generation, reminding us of the dangers that we still face.

Review:

This is a great book to read if you want to be angry. Because wow.

This book is about the phenomenon of backlash against women’s rights. In the 70s, women’s rights made huge progress, and Backlash details how society reacted to that by emotionally, economically, and politically waging war against women to try and put them back in their place.

I don’t actually hate men. Men individually can be very nice. But men as an institution are absolutely horrible. This book is full of examples of men reacting to women becoming more independent with abuse, harassment, discrimination, and injustice. This is a tome of a book (nearly 600 pages) and it’s just full of men’s attempts to tear women down, organized by category. From the personal (rape, domestic abuse, verbal sexism, workplace harassment, etc.) to the institutional (beauty standards, hiring discrimination, discrimination in the courts, the message that women aren’t worth anything unless they’re mothers, and more), there’s a whole massive campaign against women and women (and I’d wager most men) aren’t consciously aware of it.

This is a very thoroughly journalistic work, and if you have doubts, Susan has sources. Chapter one had 7 entire pages of sources. Some of it is data from interviews and time the author spent observing the situations she writes about, and some of it is from research, but it’s very well-sourced and every place she got her information is listed in the back of the book.

Even though it is focused on the 80s (the original book was published in 1991), the 2006 edition that I read had a preface with updates – but even without that, it’s still incredibly relevant. It is super long, and I know a lot of people won’t have the time or the perseverance to get through it (I almost didn’t and I love reading), but it still makes my recommended reading list. Even if you can’t get through the entire thing, just a chapter or two will help you get the picture. And if you think feminism isn’t necessary anymore, this should be required reading. We’ve come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.