Category Archives: Book Review

Hope and Cynicism

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I’ve been reading a couple books lately that deal with activism, disaster, and people’s responses to both natural and non-natural disasters. When I read Paradise Built in Hell written by Rebecca Solnit, she defined disasters created by man from a couple different perspective. One is historical failures and corruption that lead to buildings collapsing at a rate much higher than they should have. This is something she describes happening after the 1985 Mexico City earthquake.

The other type of non-natural disasters is Elite Panic, which is the process through the elites of a country overreach and treat the people of the country or city as the enemy. This happened in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and post 9/11. 9/11 was leveraged to dramatically curtail civil liberties and launch multiple wars. In some ways, those wars haven’t ended, the war on terror is still ongoing in it’s own way and Trump is essentially using this to go after Venezuela.

Despite the set backs described through Elite panic, there is always hope that something can change. This is where the books on activism really ties into this book. I’ve read a few books focus specifically on activism, Let this Radicalize you, How to blow up a pipeline, and now Read this when things fall apart. All four of these books really highlight the hope for change that can come out of any sort of crisis.

The republicans often talk about never letting a crisis go to waste, which is something that the left and democrats needs to adhere to. However, many people on the left, myself included, are extremely cynical and roll their eyes when people talk about hope, healing, love, and all that stuff.

To be clear, I struggle with this on a regular basis. Reading some of the names given specific protest events I feel my eyes rolling despite my best effort. We can’t give into that though. We need to step back and give our selves space to hold that hope. To hold the authenticity of these protests, groups, or activists, can be a challenge, but it can also give way to a moment of freedom and release. I’ve been finding, through my own health issues and through reading books full of hope, despite the darkness of our days, I’ve been able to lean into it and have felt a sort of lightness as a result.

I truly find hope in the way everyone is protesting the actions of the Trump administration. I find hope that the world will finally push back on American imperialism starting with nominal military presence in Greenland. Trump seems bound to escalate, but I think there will be some breaking point where eventually enough Republicans will break with Trump, because they finally see the end of the road for themselves.

I truly believe the bulk of the American people will continue to push back on the horrors ICE is visiting on Minneapolis and other parts of the country. We’re seeing white people using their whiteness to protect black and brown people. They are putting life and limb at risk to push back on this crack down.

We really do need to step back from our cynicism.

We should embrace our hope.

Book Review: The Myth of American Idealism

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I just wrapped up the Myth of American Idealism: How US Foreign Policy Endangers the World, by Noam Chomsky and Nathan Robinson. It’s been a while since I read a book by Chomsky. I heard about this one through an interview with Sam Seder of the Majority Report and Nathan Robinson a few days ago (mid Feb 2025). This book is apparently hot off the presses. Despite that they weren’t able to adequately discuss the Israeli invasion of Gaza, only the history leading up to it. It seems they finished that section just days before the October 7th attack.

As always Chomsky offers an interesting counter view to the mainstream press and often the view American historians. I think these views are important, as they can provide clear eyed discussions on what the US is doing at home and abroad. I think as Americans we need that. We need someone to pick us up and put us in the position of the outsider. We need to look at what our country does with the same critical lens our Press analyzes our national enemies.

Much of this book was relatively new to me. Or rather, I was aware of the events happening or that they had happened, but not to the extend described. Chomsky and Robinson constrain their review of US history to, mostly, the past 50 years, so shortly after Vietnam. However, to understand the US post Vietnam, you need to understand the Vietnam war and to understand that you need to go back at least to World War II.

As I said in my short the other day, History didn’t start on October 7th. Decisions made by one President influence and constrain the available options for the next President. Regardless of party, there is more often a likelihood of the next President will continue existing US policies. There are a variety of reasons for this, which is outlined in the book, including that even if the specific action was illegal, it’s already been done, so it’s unlikely to lead to repercussions. If the action is stopped, it may lead to a constraint on Presidential power and that would be unacceptable for the US President.

One thing that I had always wondered, since I was a teenager, is why the US sphere of direct influence, the countries in the western hemisphere are in such horrible states. This book answers it. It is US policy for these countries to be in the states they are. We have overthrown or supported the overthrow of a majority of South American countries. We have supported militaries and far right groups that support US business interests. We do not support New Deal based politics in the global south. Because that may mean providing more for the people of that country and less to the United States.

Chomsky and Robinson highlight cases in Nicaragua, Chile, Guatemala, Brazil, Ecuador, Panama, El Salvador, Honduras, and more. They describe in specific details what intervention we did. What sort of regime we supported, which includes Pinochet, which made me nauseous to read. Hell, we supported the Khmer Rouge until it wasn’t politically convenient any longer. The Khmer Rouge. Just despicable.

We, Americans, mostly White Americans, need to look at these choices head on. We need to understand what our country is doing in our name. We need to say, “No. I do not want to bomb those countries. No I do not support demanding 50% of mineral rights from Ukraine.”

Many US leaders do not want us to feel shame in our history. They do not want us to feel shame, because that shame will lead to anger and anger will lead to action. I do not feel shame over what the US has done. I feel angry. I never supported these actions. I never wanted the state to do these things. I protested against them. We should be angry. The US is a destabilizing force in the world. We need to reckon with that and make a decision on what we should do about that. We should be angry. Be Angry. Do something.

Note: Some links will be affiliate likes to Bookshop.org

Published a Book!

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It’s been a while since I published articles on this blog. I think I’m going to start up again, try and stick with something once a week or every other week. We’ll see.

There have been two reason why I haven’t been writing much on here. First, I really couldn’t deal with politics given the whole Trump administration, Covid, and my health. The other reason is that I’ve been doing a lot of short story writing over on http://www.wizardness.com

In fact, I’ve done so much that I’ve published a collection of short stories that I’ve written over the past 8 or so months. There are some that are ONLY in the book. If you’re interest, feel free to check it out. If not, that’s OK too. I mainly did it for me.

Here’s a link to the book. The main overarching theme here, is that Death is a therapist. They are there to help you transition from this life to the next without anything holding you back. It will take as long as it needs to take. Each story is a glimpse into the life of someone. It’s a part of their life that they will have to work through with Death.

If you buy it, I hope you enjoy it! Please leave a review regardless.

Book Review: Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin

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Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book builds on the research in Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism and Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, so I definitely recommend reading those two books first. I’m not alone in that, in one of the talks I’ve watched Benjamin give, she explicitly mentions those books as influencing her. I really enjoyed this book, it brought together ideas from my own master’s degree, including the complexity of how technology is used. In one class we specifically discussed the Moses’s bridges in New York (despite this being taught in the Netherlands), which were designed to exclude the poor by preventing buses from crossing the bridge. In this book she discusses this bridge and how it can pull in the very people that were expected to benefit the bridge design (basically a bus full of rich white kids went across after they came back from a trip to Europe, the driver hit the top of the bridge which resulted in 6 people getting seriously injured).

She modernizes these examples by describing how algorithms are created to approximate details about people, such as determining their ethnicity to provide “targeted services.” Due to historical redlining, the practice of creating white people only enclaves in suburbs and portions of the city (a Jim Crow era set of laws), the zip code has become a reliable indicator of ethnicity and race. She gives the example of Diversity, Inc., which creates ethnicity or racial classifications for potentially hiring companies. They will look at the names of people and assess their ethnicity, however due to the history of slavery, many African Americans have white sounding surnames, like Sarah Johnson, to “correctly” identify the ethnicity of Sarah, the company uses her zipcode to assign her race.

Overall, I found a lot of examples in this book very illuminating. Benjamin finds the approach to Design favored in Silicon Valley wanting and excluding, primarily focused on empathizing for making money, which in many cases is empathizing with whiteness. Furthermore, Benjamin argues that empathy can lead skewed results, such as body camera video providing empathy for police officers even when they are killing Black people for crimes which aren’t capital offenses or no crime at all.

As an engineer, I took this book as a warning. That we need to understand how data is impacting those around us. That we need to understand how data that might seem harmless to me, could cause serious harm to someone else. That algorithms that seem to be doing good, could instead be quickly turned into something bad. Facial recognition is a great example. Facebook tags people in photos without consent and this can be exploited by law enforcement. Furthermore, since facial recognition software is so inaccurate, it can misclassify a person as the wrong sex, the wrong person, or in extremely bad past cases, as an animal.

Furthermore, engineers have the responsibility to ensure our work is used to create more equity in the world. Benjamin offers a few different organizations that are working to ensure justice and equity for everyone. Maybe it’s time that software engineers/developers have a responsibility for this the same way a civil engineer must ensure a bridge is safe.

I recommend that anyone that works at a social media company read this. Anyone doing work for algorithms in banks, insurance, hiring, and housing really understand the fact that algorithms aren’t objective. They are as objective as our history. Our history hasn’t been objective nor equitable. We must change that.



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Book Review: Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne

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Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I wish the people that created the Netflix Documentary The Social Dilemma had read this book, I believe it would have provided a great deal of context around surveillance. Through the context of reading about race, I’ve learned a lot about American history that I regret not knowing earlier in my life. This is one of those books that does multiple things at once. First, it teaches about Black history in general, not just Black people in America, but in Africa as well. Second, it teaches about the history of prisons and the very first prison the Panopticon. Third, it discusses Surveillance and surveillance technologies.

It doesn’t teach these as separate threads, though. It’s impossible to teach these topics separately. Even when reading White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, small parts of these topics were brought up. In Between the World and Me, these same ideas were brought up, just a shorter time horizon for the history.

The United States created law after law, mechanism after mechanism, to surveil Black people. According to Browne, this as soon as an African was captured, they’d be branded, sorted, and documented. Then they’d be surveiled in the slave ship, which was a truly horrific environment.

There was something about how Browne described the slave ship that hit home a lot harder than when I’d seen the ships before. Maybe it’s the Pandemic, maybe it’s my own allergies, maybe it’s understanding that they were locked in this miserable condition for 67 days!

Speaking of the pandemic, the right-wing out bursts against wearing masks is laughable considering some of the laws we implemented in the past to protect white people from Black people. There were laws in New York City, called Lantern Laws where any Black person had to have a lantern lit at anytime after dark. They weren’t allowed to be in groups larger than three people and had to have a candle lit at all times. If they didn’t, they could get 40 lashings (apparently it was reduced later to 15). 40 Lashings could certainly kill someone.

Ultimately, the book moves from the history of surveillance to present day, which draws a pretty straight line to what we experience now at the airport after 9/11. However, in the airport Black and brown people experience significantly more surveillance than white people. This can lead to ridiculous things like having an afro searched for bomb materials and statistically higher search rates for Black Woman than white women even though statistically white women are more likely to have contraband. Further, this extends to accepting Black people as citizens, as given in an example with a Canadian woman.

I believe this book is critical in understanding our Government’s response to the BLM movement, the obsessions with Antifa, avoidance of investigating right-wing terrorism, and our current surveillance state. I think anyone that’s working in the social media space or adtech space, should read this book. If you care about ethical technology, you need to read this book. Because if we understand this and address the problems outlined in this book, we address surveillance issues for everyone.



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