It’s time for another reading list post! This month’s list will focus heavily on Silicon Valley and science fiction. Without further ado…
John Carreyrou – Bad Blood
When I read this book, I knew almost nothing about Elizabeth Holmes or Theranos. And then, after reading the book, I started watching the TV miniseries on Hulu. Now I know a lot about both Holmes and Theranos.
It’s quite a story, isn’t it? I mean, who fakes their voice?
Anyway, yes, Carreyrou wrote the book of record on Holmes’s downfall. Along the way, he writes about Holmes tricking a bunch of old white guys into believing she’s some kind of Silicon Valley genius, stringing along investors for years, and cheating the many innocent people who believed in her vision of convenient, reliable blood testing from one drop of blood.
Carreyrou tells a whopper of a story. At the same time, he sees the ordinariness of the game Holmes plays. Any distinction between Holmes and normal Silicon Valley behavior is a matter of degree, not of kind. Whenever a new Holmes comes along, Silicon Valley will fall for it again.
Ian M. Banks – Consider Phlebas
I started reading Bank’s Culture series some time ago. While it all started with Consider Phlebas, I didn’t get around to reading the first book until recently. Does it hold up? Is it outdated?
For the most part, it holds up really well! I think it took Banks awhile to arrive at the right balance between social commentary and action. That shows a bit in this one – he spends a bit too much time lecturing the reader on the Culture. But he does thankfully leave a lot of it for the book’s appendix.
However, Banks wraps all that around a great action story with a compelling (if disappointing) ending. We learn about the Idiran-Culture War. But we do so, in Banks style, through various side characters not directly involved in the war.
Timothy Zahn – Lots of Thrawn Books!
Almost every type of Star Wars fan knows about Zahn and enjoys his work. Certainly any fan from the 1990s knows all about him. He wrote a series of novels (first a trilogy, and then two more books) centered on the character Grand Admiral Thrawn. Thrawn struck readers as the most compelling Star Wars character created after 1980 – an alien, art critic, and brilliant military strategist who becomes a top leader in an Imperial system built partly on xenophobic hatred of all aliens.
Of course, Disney tossed all this out when it purchased Star Wars from George Lucas. It dropped the entire – messy and incoherent – universe of Stars Wars novels. But then it brought Zahn back to write more novels about Thrawn. 6 of them so far.
And then it brought Zahn back to write 6 (so far) more novels about Thrawn. The new Zahn novels trace Thrawn’s earlier history: his rise as a Chiss military strategist, his exile from the Chiss, his joining of the Empire and rise through the Imperial ranks. He even has a few encounters with Darth Vader.
The books are fun. Even worth a read. The best place to start? Either Thrawn or Chaos Rising. Enjoy!
Shoshanna Zuboff – The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Zuboff takes a close – and very in depth – look at capitalism in the tech world. She does a couple of things in this book. First, she argues that the sort of capitalism created by the tech companies – one based on social media, coercion of people into giving up their data, selling of data to advertisers, and prediction and manipulation of behavior – forms a novel kind of capitalism that she calls ‘surveillance capitalism.’ Second, she describes in detail how these things work.
As far as the second part of the project goes, Zuboff succeeds. She gives us a lot of great history into how companies twisted arms until they got our data, especially Google. Had Zuboff strained out the rest of the book – the pop philosophy and chapters on behaviorism and ‘Big Other’ – it would’ve been a great book.
But the first part fails. While surveillance capitalism does a lot of things that are new and bad, there’s nothing really new about it. It’s just capitalism. Specifically, it’s finance capitalism.
Zuboff tries a million ways to argue that it’s new or different – that it opposes democracy, that it molds behavior according to principles of Skinner’s behaviorism, that it departs from capitalist and neoliberal individualism, and so on – but none of these things depart from capitalism in its core features. Capitalism has always been about the accumulation of capital through profit-making, through taking the value produced by workers, through grifting in a million ways, and so on. All that happens in surveillance capitalism, too.
