Reviews and Comments

The book explores the minds of the libertarian movement that have tried to crack up the nation-states in the name of capitalism without democracy and without national / legal oversight. The book starts with an exploration of Uncle Miltie's fondness for pre-reunification Hong Kong as well as the case of Singapore. As an aside, the book shows three generations of Friedmans, all with the same unoriginal ideas. More generally then, the book is about zones, export processing zones, economic development zones, free trade zones, all these areas carved out of national territories, exempt from regulations, labor laws, and (heaven forbid) taxation. This is the dream of libertarians: to crack up the nation-states, and create thousands of zones, governed by libertarian principles. It's entirely coincidental (snark) that these libertarian thinkers almost always end up bedfellows with white supremacists (see the case of Ciskei as "voluntary segregation"). For them, racial separatism and segregation is ok as long as it "chosen" from the bottom up, rather than imposed. Out of this type of thinking also came the idea of seasteading, entities existing in international waters, therefore either not subject to any national laws, or choosing which ones to navigate to. In all the cases presented in the book, the common thread is a disdain for democracy and popular governance, and a solid dose of old-fashioned social darwinism, with the libertarians seeing themselves as superior beings, able to win against the Westphalian order, by sheer force of how much better the zones are, compared to messy democracy. In the end, all the different projects that have been tried, have largely been failures, but that never stops these self-proclaimed geniuses from moving on from one failure to the next, while claiming to go galt. And there is always seems to be deep-pocketed funders for these projects (the Koch brother are mentioned multiple times). The book is rich in examples of attempts at creating these libertarian paradises, from, again, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the docks of London, all the way to Dubai, Honduras, and, of course, the metaverse. In meatware or virtual reality, the wealthy can't wait to get away from the rest of us, and certainly away from any idea of the common good. And yet, as the book notes, "From Honduras to Dubai, the waged service class is the easiest for the visionaries to forget and the hardest for them to live without. (...) The cloud floats because the underclass holds it up." (222). Never mind the environmental toll of maintaining a "cloud country", funded through, of course, cryptocurrency. It is totally dystopian, of course, but there are some powerful backers behind this movement, like Peter Thiel. We should pay attention.

This book is based on Karen Levy's research on the integration of electronic logging devices (ELDs) in trucks, supposedly to ensure better compliance with work hours rules and other regulations. Levy shows the actual impact of the devices (used mostly by large trucking companies initially, since then made mandatory by federal transportation authorities). This is where #sociology of #labor meets the #surveillance society. Levy explores the truckers' culture and ethos, based on rugged individualist values and not a small dose of machismo and how this culture conflates with increased surveillance, leading to various forms of deviance and ways to "hack" electronic surveillance. All the while, Levy explores the underlying structure of the trucking industry, its winners and losers, where exploitation is located and how the ELDs are positioned within the web of power relationships within this industry. This may all seem complicated (it is!) but Levy's writing is relatively jargon-free and clear. This a is a book that is perfectly appropriate for undergraduates. I should note that there is a really good methodological appendix at the end.

Trust the Plan, by Daily Beast's Will Sommer, covers some of the same territory Van Badham's QAnon and On does, but because the former is more recent, it almost picks up where Badham leaves off. Sommer goes through some of the history of QAnon, starting all the way back to 4Chan and Gamergate, all the way to now. Some of this is already well known, and there is a certain amount of fatalism in Sommer's view that our current system cannot deal with QAnon, now that it's been welcome into the GOP. At the same time, Sommer's book clearly shows that QAnon is dangerous. The only quibble I'll have with the book is the repetition of the false frame of "America's political polarization". We're not polarized: one party decided to embrace a conspiracy theory and make it its core ideology, on a path to fascism via local and state-level authoritarianism. Sommer sees no solution to this as he seems to think it's already too late.

The book takes as its starting point the arrests of Lori Vallow ("doomsday mom" as the media and social media started calling her) and her accomplice Chad Daybell, and follows the thread of Apocalypse-obsessed fringe LDS groups. Both are currently awaiting trial and facing the death penalty for a bunch of murders that include two of Lori's children, her ex-husband, and Chad's wife. What makes this book especially interesting is that it's not just a true crime reporting but it incorporates the context of what makes these weird "the end is nigh" offshoots of LDS actually not so much bizarre deviations but logical extensions. In other words, the fringe is not so much the fringe as slightly off-center. In addition, these cultish LDS groups overlap quite a bit with other similarly cultish groups: anti-government / anti-tax sovereign citizen-types, Q (of course), and white nationalists. As the author notes, "At the heart of what happened is an ecosystem of extremism: extreme preppers arming up for the end of the world, extreme Mormons who focus only on the “latter-day” part of their church’s name." So this cannot be dismissed as the doings of deranged individuals.

The journalists who wrote this book did for cybersurveillance, what the Panama Papers investigation did for wealthy tax cheats. In both cases, a consortium of journalists got a treasure trove of data from an anonymous source and went to work with fellow reporters around the world. In the case of Pegasus, we are talking about the software sold by Israeli company NSO to governments. Pegasus, once it infects someone's phone, can basically access all the data, media, contacts. It can also turn on the phone mic and camera and record private conversations. NSO advertised it as designed to thwart terrorist and criminal organizations, but of course, Pegasus was used to by questionable governments (Morocco, Mexico, Azerbaijan, India, among others) to spy on journalists, political opponents, human right activists... and Jamal Khashoggi (and his wife, fiancee, and son), but also heads of state (such as Macron and almost his entire cabinet). The book is the breathless race from the Forbidden Stories reporters (and their associates from other newspapers) and well as Amnesty International's Security Lab technicians to figure out what the data they received meant, design a tool to determine whether or not a phone had been infected by Pegasus, ascertain the identities of the victims of Pegasus, and do all this without leaks before the official release of the stories written based on the data. It is riveting. And yet, while NSO took a major hit when the stories were published, the Pegasus clients pretty much got away with it and no significant legislations were passed to protect us from unwarranted (and creepy) cybersurveillance. There are a lot of NSO-type companies out there and not much to stop them.

Doctorow is known for his activism in favor of the open web and privacy rights. In this book, with Rebecca Giblin, they describe how the corporate monopolies and monopsonies are strangling the culture industry and especially creators and makers upon whose content and creativity these corporations and platforms rely. And so, we learn a lot about how Amazon, Spotify, Live Nation, and Youtube, among others, have created bottlenecks (or chokepoints, hence the title) between creators and audiences, to the detriment of both. This accomplished through network effects, vertical and horizontal integration, blocking new entrants, regulatory capture, and manipulation of copyright laws, as well as non-compete clauses which lock in workers (as time of writing, FTC chair Lina Khan is proposing to eliminate those, which would be great). The first part of the book describes these mechanisms in clear detail. The second part of the book focuses on potential solutions to break those chokepoints and restore competition for healthier, more pluralistic, and more competitive cultural markets. Such potential solutions include reform of copyright and antitrust laws, unionization and minimum wage for cultural producers, among other things. The authors specify that, while the focus of the book is the cultural sector, monopolies and monopsonies exist elsewhere in our economies. I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 because it does go into the weeds of the cultural sector, which is sometimes tedious to read, especially in the second part of the book. That being said, it is well worth reading and important.