i cannot fathom how anyone would think Zuboff's writing was "dry" or difficult to get through. I devoured this book in a couple of days. Her prose balanced technical writing with storytelling and kept me hooked for a hundred pages at a time. The subject matter of the book was familiar to me, but Zuboff makes clear that the devil is in the details by spending over 500 pages leaving no stone unturned in the examination on surveillance capitalism. I only wish that her conclusion had a stronger call to action for its reader. I do not think it is enough to declare our opposition to surveillance capitalism. I wanted to learn of organizations to join and donate to, or actions I could take on my own social media and electronic devices.
Reviews and Comments
a little alien robot who came to earth bc she ran out of books to read on her home planet
This link opens in a pop-up window
b bennett reviewed The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim
Not just for IT
4 stars
I don’t work in IT. I’m a data person leading a team at a large national political organization. But I was unloading all my problems (misunderstanding of data among org leaders, too many meetings, too much work, technical debt) to a technical mental of mine who insisted I pick up The Phoenix Project. While reading this book, I actively had to translate the IT jargon into something more relatable for my reference frame. Yet despite having no knowledge of IT or “DevOps” this book was a wealth of knowledge with tangible insights that I could take back to my team. I had many moments empathizing with Bill as he recovered from one crisis to another and battled various business and external challenges as well as “a-ha” moments as Bill learned to navigate his hectic workplace. Some of the books takeaways aren’t useful to me. Some I already knew. But if …
I don’t work in IT. I’m a data person leading a team at a large national political organization. But I was unloading all my problems (misunderstanding of data among org leaders, too many meetings, too much work, technical debt) to a technical mental of mine who insisted I pick up The Phoenix Project. While reading this book, I actively had to translate the IT jargon into something more relatable for my reference frame. Yet despite having no knowledge of IT or “DevOps” this book was a wealth of knowledge with tangible insights that I could take back to my team. I had many moments empathizing with Bill as he recovered from one crisis to another and battled various business and external challenges as well as “a-ha” moments as Bill learned to navigate his hectic workplace. Some of the books takeaways aren’t useful to me. Some I already knew. But if anything I felt seen — knowing that others deal with what I deal with, across industries, was enough for me
b bennett reviewed Exhalation by Ted Chiang
just some damn good sci fi
4 stars
The sci fi short story is my jam. It’s what I fall back on time and time again when I’m looking for a book to scratch that itch—the one to rekindle my love of reading.
I adored this collection of short stories, with my favorites being the first, the titular story, and the one about the life cycle of digients.
b bennett rated Exhalation: 4 stars
b bennett reviewed The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
Holy fuck
5 stars
Wow. What else is there to say? This book was a buffet of ideas ranging from sexism, capitalism, socialism, the military-industrial complex, and politics. I especially enjoyed Le Guin's writing on women, but anarchist and archist, through the eyes of the anarchist main character. For the first few chapters I was amazed at Le Guin's interpretation at an anarchist utopian, and took it as a blueprint for the work we socialists have to do here on Earth. But as the book progressed we learned more about the so-called utopia and it's possible fault -- one of which being politics and the formation of government--and I finished the book with more questions than answers. This was a delightful and nerdy read.
b bennett rated The Dispossessed: 5 stars
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
Shevek, a brilliant physicist, decides to take action. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down …
b bennett reviewed The Disordered Cosmos by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
What I needed 10 years ago, what I needed now
5 stars
My first love was physics. As a teenager I used my newfound ability to access torrents to amass a collection of physics and mathematics textbooks, including a complete collection of the Feynman lectures. I demanded my grandmother drag me to the science museum every time my mom dropped me off at her home. I spent my high school years wishing I were smart enough to attend the, what I considered “cool”, science and math magnet school. I went off to college with the intention of majoring in physics, but when I informed my grandmother of my plans she shot me a concerned look and inquired “and what does one /do/ with that?”
In my story growing up in a family that fled domestic violence and endured years of stalking and surveillance, it had been grilled into me that the path out of poverty was to go to college and make …
My first love was physics. As a teenager I used my newfound ability to access torrents to amass a collection of physics and mathematics textbooks, including a complete collection of the Feynman lectures. I demanded my grandmother drag me to the science museum every time my mom dropped me off at her home. I spent my high school years wishing I were smart enough to attend the, what I considered “cool”, science and math magnet school. I went off to college with the intention of majoring in physics, but when I informed my grandmother of my plans she shot me a concerned look and inquired “and what does one /do/ with that?”
In my story growing up in a family that fled domestic violence and endured years of stalking and surveillance, it had been grilled into me that the path out of poverty was to go to college and make something of myself. Physics was not an option. That was for people whose entirely livelihoods didn’t depend on their ability to land a job immediately after college.
So while physics was my first love, I felt right at home in my engineering degree. But I wasn’t just at any engineering school. I specifically chose a liberal arts historical womens college to pursue engineering. I wanted to surround myself with anthropologists and history majors, with people who could expose me to different ideas and world views. I had no intention of being “one of those” STEM folk who couldn’t form a sentence or relate to other folk.
I spent 4 years earning my engineering degree. Along the way I sat in lectures that insisted upon us the moral obligations of engineers to “do good”, that ethics and morals are intrinsic aspects of engineering, and how we cannot divorce the scientific act of engineering from the social, cultural, and economic landscapes of our work.
And then I watched all my peers take jobs at companies that made bombs. I wondered, “were we in the same classes? did they not get the same lessons I did?”
That brings me to Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s book. In it, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein details her love of particle physics, recounts her journey to becoming a Black woman physics professor, and shared with us a delightful treasure of thoughts ranging from the intersection of fascism and science to a takedown of the gender binary.
I abandoned my engineering career one year out of college after enduring a year of bullying, sexism, and classism in a consecrating civil engineering firm. Reading this book lit a flame in me that had long been extinguished. The book starts with a damn nerdy and technical description of how the universe works, and I remembered that I used to devour this stuff for fun once upon a time. The book goes on to offer an intellectual gauntlet of critical analyses covering everything from physics, feminism, race, politics, colonialism, fascism, identity politics, rape culture, gender, class, and more than I could do justice.
This is the book I wish I had read as an engineering student in college. It’s the book I wish I could make my old college classmates read (which may be better than grabbing them by shoulders to demand how they could possibly help fuel the industrial-war complex after all that we were taught in college). It’s the nerdy, technical, thoughtful, feminist gift that would have scratched the right itch for me all those years ago. Maybe I’d still be an engineer if I had this book 10 years ago.
b bennett rated The Disordered Cosmos: 5 stars
b bennett finished reading The Disordered Cosmos by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
My first love was physics. As a teenager I used my newfound ability to access torrents to amass a collection of physics and mathematics textbooks, including a complete collection of the Feynman lectures. I demanded my grandmother drag me to the science museum every time my mom dropped me off at her home. I spent my high school years wishing I were smart enough to attend the, what I considered “cool”, science and math magnet school. I went off to college with the intention of majoring in physics, but when I informed my grandmother of my plans she shot me a concerned look and inquired “and what does one /do/ with that?”
In my story growing up in a family that fled domestic violence and endured years of stalking and surveillance, it had been grilled into me that the path out of poverty was to go to college and make …
My first love was physics. As a teenager I used my newfound ability to access torrents to amass a collection of physics and mathematics textbooks, including a complete collection of the Feynman lectures. I demanded my grandmother drag me to the science museum every time my mom dropped me off at her home. I spent my high school years wishing I were smart enough to attend the, what I considered “cool”, science and math magnet school. I went off to college with the intention of majoring in physics, but when I informed my grandmother of my plans she shot me a concerned look and inquired “and what does one /do/ with that?”
In my story growing up in a family that fled domestic violence and endured years of stalking and surveillance, it had been grilled into me that the path out of poverty was to go to college and make something of myself. Physics was not an option. That was for people whose entirely livelihoods didn’t depend on their ability to land a job immediately after college.
So while physics was my first love, I felt right at home in my engineering degree. But I wasn’t just at any engineering school. I specifically chose a liberal arts historical womens college to pursue engineering. I wanted to surround myself with anthropologists and history majors, with people who could expose me to different ideas and world views. I had no intention of being “one of those” STEM folk who couldn’t form a sentence or relate to other folk.
I spent 4 years earning my engineering degree. Along the way I sat in lectures that insisted upon us the moral obligations of engineers to “do good”, that ethics and morals are intrinsic aspects of engineering, and how we cannot divorce the scientific act of engineering from the social, cultural, and economic landscapes of our work.
And then I watched all my peers take jobs at companies that made bombs. I wondered, “were we in the same classes? did they not get the same lessons I did?”
That brings me to Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s book. In it, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein details her love of particle physics, recounts her journey to becoming a Black woman physics professor, and shared with us a delightful treasure of thoughts ranging from the intersection of fascism and science to a takedown of the gender binary.
I abandoned my engineering career one year out of college after enduring a year of bullying, sexism, and classism in a consecrating civil engineering firm. Reading this book lit a flame in me that had long been extinguished. The book starts with a damn nerdy and technical description of how the universe works, and I remembered that I used to devour this stuff for fun once upon a time. The book goes on to offer an intellectual gauntlet of critical analyses covering everything from physics, feminism, race, politics, colonialism, fascism, identity politics, rape culture, gender, class, and more than I could do justice.
This is the book I wish I had read as an engineering student in college. It’s the book I wish I could make my old college classmates read (which may be better than grabbing them by shoulders to demand how they could possibly help fuel the industrial-war complex after all that we were taught in college). It’s the nerdy, technical, thoughtful, feminist gift that would have scratched the right itch for me all those years ago. Maybe I’d still be an engineer if I had this book 10 years ago.
b bennett reviewed All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
Exactly what I needed
5 stars
I picked this book up in my local book store while on a quest to find something to restart my love of reading. A year plus of near complete isolation during the onset of the pandemic led me to rely increasingly more on my phone for bursts of serotonin and I wound up wrecking my focus. Standing in the book store, I figured anything in the sci-fi section would do the trick - it’s worked in the past. I wound up purchasing AtBinS solely on the cover art not knowing anything about the story or the author. The book sat among my looming “to-read” pile for months until I was several days deep into a week long vacation. I figured it couldn’t to take an hour away from my phone, and by the time I looked up from the book over an hour had passed. I finished the book the …
I picked this book up in my local book store while on a quest to find something to restart my love of reading. A year plus of near complete isolation during the onset of the pandemic led me to rely increasingly more on my phone for bursts of serotonin and I wound up wrecking my focus. Standing in the book store, I figured anything in the sci-fi section would do the trick - it’s worked in the past. I wound up purchasing AtBinS solely on the cover art not knowing anything about the story or the author. The book sat among my looming “to-read” pile for months until I was several days deep into a week long vacation. I figured it couldn’t to take an hour away from my phone, and by the time I looked up from the book over an hour had passed. I finished the book the next day in a 5-hour marathon that kept me up til midnight. Judging by the GoodReads reviews, this book is not everyone’s cup of tea, but it was the exact kind of magical-realism sci-fi witchy tech-y love story that I needed to rekindle my love of reading.
Just some damn good speculative fiction
4 stars
I picked this book up in a Chicago bookstore, drawn to the title’s blatant parallels to a book that shaped my political views. A People’s Future promises a collection of speculative fiction - curated at the start of Trump’s presidency- to inspire a new vision of resistance in times of oppression, surveillance, and fascism. My favorite stories in this collection are from the usual suspects - Charlie Jane Anders, N K Jemesin , and Charles Ya …but I was also introduced to new authors such as Tananarive Due and Omar El Akkad. Not every story resonated with me, but I still cherish this collection for giving me just enough hope when I was so desperately craving it.
b bennett rated All the Birds in the Sky: 5 stars
All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
An ancient society of witches and a hipster technological startup go war as the world from tearing itself. To further …
b bennett finished reading All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
I picked this book up in my local book store while on a quest to find something to restart my love of reading. A year plus of near complete isolation during the onset of the pandemic led me to rely increasingly more on my phone for bursts of serotonin and I wound up wrecking my focus. Standing in the book store, I figured anything in the sci-fi section would do the trick - it’s worked in the past. I wound up purchasing AtBinS solely on the cover art not knowing anything about the story or the author. The book sat among my looming “to-read” pile for months until I was several days deep into a week long vacation. I figured it couldn’t to take an hour away from my phone, and by the time I looked up from the book over an hour had passed. I finished the book the …
I picked this book up in my local book store while on a quest to find something to restart my love of reading. A year plus of near complete isolation during the onset of the pandemic led me to rely increasingly more on my phone for bursts of serotonin and I wound up wrecking my focus. Standing in the book store, I figured anything in the sci-fi section would do the trick - it’s worked in the past. I wound up purchasing AtBinS solely on the cover art not knowing anything about the story or the author. The book sat among my looming “to-read” pile for months until I was several days deep into a week long vacation. I figured it couldn’t to take an hour away from my phone, and by the time I looked up from the book over an hour had passed. I finished the book the next day in a 5-hour marathon that kept me up til midnight. Judging by the GoodReads reviews, this book is not everyone’s cup of tea, but it was the exact kind of magical-realism sci-fi witchy tech-y love story that I needed to rekindle my love of reading.