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This is an amazing compendium of evidence about how tech platforms - and in particular, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook - built algorithms that are directly responsible for widespread polarization, violence, and a global shift to the right of politics, fueling the hatred and division that's widespread today.

If you want to understand why our political situation is so dire, this is a great place to start.

My only criticism is that the book is somewhat repetitive, and that by the end, you know the playbook, but you just keep seeing more instances of it.

This book is broadly split into two halves: the first half simply summarizes the scientific consensus around climate change and the impacts it will likely have. The second half discusses the implications on human society: on our conceptions of technology, capitalism, history, growth, and so on.

The first half was a compilation of studies and facts and events, centered around a theme (heating, drowning, wildifire, oceans, etc). For someone unaware of the state of scientific understanding, I can imagine it would serve as a wake up call, but as I already had some understanding of the state of affairs, to me it was more repetitive and served as a conformation of ideas I already knew. The barrage of numbers and percentages was dizzying though.

The second half, which discussed how society may evolve to react to these changes, was more interesting. The section on history detailed how the prevailing narrative of history, one of continuous forward progress, will be entirely upended by climate change. The section on politics discussed the emergence of inward-looking climate strongmen leaders, who may further exacerbate the issues, as well as other models that are possible. The section on storytelling explains how climate change, as a "hyperobject", isn't well suited for traditional prevalent narrative structures, and how perceptions of alarmism are hotly discussed in climate circles, how scientists aren't sure what level of "freaking out" is appropriate. Overall, I appreciated the discussion in this second half more than the first.

I found the language of this book often perplexing, but perhaps that's more reflective of my own lack of practice reading, rather than a criticism of the book. It was tough to read, both for its depressing content and its language. I didn't particularly enjoy reading this book, but I imagine this is not a book that is intended to be enjoyed. I did learn a bit, but not as much as I would have wanted. I think the tone is quite defeatist, which may in fact be the right mindset given the current situation. The author is, however, cognizant enough of this to explicitly discuss attitudes towards the problem in the final chapter "Ethics At The End Of The World" (and I liked the idea of cosmic stewardship put forth, but not wholly endorsed, by the author).

One particular passage from the opening chapter of the book was particularly powerful to me. I'll reproduce it in full here.

For those telling stories about climate, such horrific possibilities-and the fact that we had squandered out chance of landing anywhere on the better half of that curve-had become somehow unseemly to consider. The reasons are almost too many to count, and so half-formed they might better be called impulses. We chose not to discuss a world warmed beyond two degrees out of decency, perhaps; or simple fear; or fear of fear-mongering; or technocratic faith, which is really market faith; or deference to partisan debates or even partisan priorities; or scepticism about the environmental Left of the kind I'd always had; or disinterest in the fates of distant ecosystems like I'd also always had. We felt confusion about the science and its many technical terms and hard-to-parse numbers, or at least an intuition that others would be easily confused about the science and its many technical terms and hard-to-parse numbers. We suffered slowness apprehending the speed of change, or semi-conspiratorial confidence in the responsibility of global elites and their institutions, or obeisance towards those elites and their institutions, whatever we thought of them. Perhaps we felt unable to really trust scarier projections because we'd only just heard about warming, we thought, and things couldn't possibly have gotten that much worse since the first Inconvenient Truth; or because we liked driving our cars and eating our beef and living as we did in every other way and didn't want to think too hard about that; or because we felt so "postindustrial" we couldn't believe we still drawing material breaths from fossil fuel furnaces. Perhaps it was because we were so sociopathically good at collating bad news into a sickening evolving sense of what constituted "normal", or because we looked outside and things still seemed okay. Because we were bored with writing, or reading, the same story again and again, because climate was so global and therefore non-tribal it suggested only the corniest politics, because we didn't yet appreciate how fully it would ravage our lives, and because, selfishly, we didn't mind destroying the planet for others living elsewhere on it or those not yet born who would inherit it from us, outraged. Because we had too much faith in the teleological shape of history and the arrow of human progress to countenance the idea that the arc of history would bend toward anything but environmental justice, too. Because when we were being really honest with ourselves we already thought of the world as a zero-sum resource competition and believed that whatever happened we were probably going to continue to be the victors, relatively speaking anyway, advantages of class being what they are and our own luck in the natalist lottery being what it was. Perhaps we were too panicked about our own jobs and industries to fret about the future of jobs and industry; or perhaps we were also really afraid of robots or were too busy looking at our new phones; or perhaps, however easy we found the apocalypse reflex in our culture and the path of panic in our politics, we truly had a good-news bias when it came to the big picture; or, really, who knows why-there are so many aspects to the climate kaleidoscope that transforms our intuitions about environmental devastation into an uncanny complacency that it can be hard to pull the whole picture of climate distortion into focus. But we simply wouldn't or couldn't, or anyway didn't look squarely in the face of the science.

"If morality represents the ideal world, then economics represents the actual world."

Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, is an intriguing book. The book is unique in the sense that (as the authors proclaim multiple times), it has no unifying theme. The book's format is simple: It poses a question to the reader, and goes about answering the question using data. These questions are very interesting ones, such as what the reasons behind the sudden drop in crime rates in the US in the 1990s were, why drug dealers live with their mothers, how significant is the impact of certain parenting techniques on children, and so on. Some of these questions may be trivial, whereas some seem important. The authors then go about answering these questions by analyzing data. The conclusions drawn are fascinating, but after a while, they seem quite obvious. The book also occasionally presents snippets of the data used, and shows how the authors came to the conclusions. In some sense, the book's objective is to reveal the hidden side of things.To me, Freakonomics presented a completely new way of thinking - using data. It showed me the significance of data analysis, and how it can be used to answer such diverse questions. However, towards the end, my interest in the book dwindled sligtly, as the book became a touch monotonous. Nevertheless, the book was all in all an insightful read, and I recommend it to just about anybody who would like to understand the "Freakonomic"(using data to reveal the hidden side of things) way of thinking.