Reviews and News:
The Mooch will write a book about Trump after all, but it won’t be a tell-all of his tenure in the White House. Instead, it will focus on Trump’s “management style.” I suppose one illusory subject is as good as another.
Joanna Baron and Jerry Gibbon review Mary Beard’s Women and Power: A Manifesto: “Three thousand years of Western prejudice have assigned political power exclusively to the audible male voice, Beard maintains. From Homer onward, she argues, our culture has been built on a refusal to grant authority, or ‘muthos,’ to the higher pitch of women’s voices.”
What is reputation? We used to know. Do we any longer?
Edward Gorey’s phantasmagorical world.
Disney’s fairy tales offer a sanitized view of the world. Kay Nielsen’s illustrations didn’t.
The University of Arizona claims it can predict which students will drop out with surprising accuracy using information gathered from student ID card swipes.
Essay of the Day:
Do we really need to be worried about the antitrust tendencies of big tech companies? Edward Tenner in The Hedgehog Review:
“In October 2017, the Wall Street Journal editorial pages featured an op-ed by Luther Lowe, vice president for public policy at the review site Yelp, bearing the unequivocal headline ‘It’s Time to Bust the Online Trusts.’ The essay, in which Lowe argued that Google, Facebook, and other giants of the Web are abusing their dominance to promote their own services over third-party competitors, was accompanied by a cartoon depicting Google, Facebook, and Twitter as bloated, top-hatted, Gilded Age plutocrats being confronted on the witness stand in a congressional hearing. It recalled a famous 1889 drawing published in Puck, ‘The Bosses of the Senate,’ except that there the ‘Steel Beam Trust,’ ‘Standard Oil,’ and a dozen other corporate giants were the ones glowering at the intimidated legislators.
“The Wall Street Journal is normally skeptical of antitrust zeal. But in it and other mainstream publications previously well disposed toward Silicon Valley, concerns about the power of Google (formally Alphabet), Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft—sometimes collectively called the Frightful Five—plus Twitter, Uber, and others, have been growing. (To judge from their purchases of products and services, no equivalent distrust among consumers is yet in the making.) As the online magazine Politico put it in the headline of one of its reports, ‘Conservatives, Liberals Unite against Silicon Valley.
“A scan of notable books on the subject yields Zeynep Tufecki’s Twitter and Tear Gas (a critique of the revolutionary potential of social media), Noam Cohen’s The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball, Scott Timberg’s Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class, Jonathan Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy, and Franklin Foer’s World without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, its title echoing that of Simon Head’s earlier Mindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans. All raise suspicions about the digital giants and their effects on our culture. All hold the Big Tech companies and their beguiling products responsible, in varying degrees, for everything from growing incivility and political polarization to a declining faith in facts and truth, from the addictive manipulations of our attention to the secretive exploitation of our user data. If all that were not bad enough, some of these critics suggest, the growing monopolistic power of the largest tech companies threatens to limit the creativity, autonomy, and earnings of artists, writers, and intellectuals, thus diminishing the mind and soul of our larger culture.
“But for all their timely warnings about the harms Big Tech may be visiting upon us, the larger antimonopoly case being advanced by Taplin, Foer, Cohen, and others suffers from a certain historical myopia. Monopoly and oligopoly have consequences, particularly in the domain of the media, but the world of analog culture was never as stable as it now appears. Nor was it ever as free of its Darwinian, even Hobbesian, struggles as some might imagine.
“One might begin a more nuanced appraisal by recognizing that, for all their billions, the Silicon Valley moguls still have a comparatively fragile political base. In 1881, one of the earliest muckrakers, Henry Demarest Lloyd, declared in The Atlantic Monthly that John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company had ‘done everything with the Pennsylvania legislature, except refine it.’ So the difference between the Puck and Wall Street Journal cartoons is telling. In the 1880s, the monopolies were dominating legislators. In 2017, the giants appear to be fighting to retain their influence. Google and Facebook, in particular, seem to have allowed domestic and foreign trolls to shape online conversations contrary to their executives’ positions on immigration, church and state, climate change, and other issues. So who, really, is in charge here?”
Photos: Reindeer herders vote
Poem: Rex Wilder, “Empirical”
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