A stint of unemployment last year means that this blog is more than caught up. There are heaps of posts ready to go (almost a year’s worth!), just waiting for their scheduled time. If you see a book review, I may have read that book a year ago. I should start putting dates on these things.
But I only mention this to say that I jumped this one up to the top of the line. I think it is that important. Not only did I actually finished reading this maybe a week or two before this post goes live, but I also stopped reading the other things I was reading to pick up this instead. Again, I think this is a pretty important book, and now is the time to read it.
I am not happy with the way the world is going, and I don’t think I am alone in this sentiment. I think all of us have different aspects of the modern world we are disgruntled about. Many of us are disgruntled about how the tech giants are dominating our life. If you are, you should read this book and find out just how bad it is, and how it is affecting a class of people you don’t normally hear about. If you aren’t disgruntled by tech giants, read this book and become so.
To give the gist of it: tech companies have given themselves massively unfair advantages by forming monopsonies instead of the traditional monopolies our grade-school teachers taught us to fear. These monopsonies allow tech companies many unfair advantages in the open market.
I doubt I needed to tell you any of that. I imagine you likely already had some sort of inkling to it. But the book goes into a whole lot of detail about the phenomenon, and what we can do to fight back. That last part is crucial. Some books on the modern political situation tend to take an ‘all is lost’ approach (lookin at you, Chris Hedges), which largely ends up as a call to give up and roll over and take it. Here, that thankfully isn’t done. Nor is there the ‘burn it all down and let’s start over’ attitude you get from other people who lement modern times. There is a call to action, and even a strategy to the action, and neither of them have anything to do with a strategy that entails abandoning modernity.
I have often said before that it is a lot harder for me to write reviews of books I enjoyed. I think that is doubly so for books I find important. The hell are you waiting for?
So please, go out and buy this book. Read it. Then think about what you learned from it. See what you can do to act on what it is talking about. Because it really will be only via a team effort that we can win against the big corporations.
Failures in Polymathy 