#recoding americ

[mad-rdr]

April Reads

9 books this month!

The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien (★ ★ ★ ★/5): I’ve finally read the og fantasy book and honestly it was so nice to go back to the basics before “romantasy” became a thing. An adventure for an adventure's sake !

The War of Two Queens by Jennifer Armentrout (★ ★ ★/5): this book should’ve been book 2 and we could’ve skipped those other ones. There’s a lot of unnecessary back and forth in this book and once again I stress the importance of editors. The anticipated threesome was okay, could’ve been better tbh. Honestly, I will not be finishing this series- especially after learning that book 5 is literally just a retelling of book 1 in Casteel’s POV. Respectfully I don’t care enough to continue

Spoiler Alert by Olivia Dade (★ ★ ★/5): this book, much like the storyline consists of, reads like fanfiction. I was genuinely taken aback by the Ao3-formatted chapters within this book, like I did not think that was necessary but okay. Not awful, but be prepared for cringy adults (almost 40 yrs old btw) that have little to no communication skills

Stalking Jack the Ripper by Kerri Maniscalco (★ ★ ★/5): I'm a little late to the hype of this book but it was enjoyable nonetheless. I loved Audrey Rose and Thomas' interactions and all props to them both for being interested in mortuary science... couldn't be me

Hunting Prince Dracula by Kerri Maniscalco (★ ★ ★ ★/5): this was a good mysterious follow up to the first book, although I think it's funny that they went through all of that to not get admitted into the forensics school (also these poor children have soo much trauma now)

Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka (★ ★ ★/5): a good insight into how efforts to make the government smaller have actually made possible technological advancements nearly impossible (at least on government websites). The policy loopholes (more like tangles) are astounding and frustrating and the government is a mess

Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Patel (★ ★ ★ ★ ★/5): I'm only a little familiar with the original Hindu myth of Ramayana but I feel like this take was so good! I really enjoyed Kaikeyi's story and learning abt her motivations for what she did, mythology (and history) is never kind to female voices, and I think their stories need to be told too

Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson (★ ★ ★ ★/5): what a fun little mystery novel! The humor of the narrator made this quite enjoyable and quick to read, although I'm a little disappointed this wasn't a story about a family of serial killers

Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune (★ ★ ★ ★ ★/5): this was such a wholesome story about life after death and seeing the best in humanity. This also taught me that life is too short to not be lived. Go out into the world and live and love and learn and do all the things you want to do without waiting for the "right" moment !

[maaarine]

Kara Swisher:

“I did a big long interview with Mark Zuckerberg that he probably shouldn’t have done. I couldn’t get him to understand consequences.

A famous Facebook motto is “move fast and break things.” This was plastered on the walls of Facebook.

They had all kinds of sayings and stupid stuff like that. Most of these companies do.

But I remember saying, “break?” and they were like, “Yeah, break.” I’m like, “Break is bad.” It was like a debate.”

Roger McNamee:

“That was something that I think came in with the PayPal mafia. This is Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Elon Musk as well.

They came in and brought this philosophy. It was so spectacularly successful so quickly. The issues took a long time to show up.

Silicon Valley has to remember that it’s spent 50 years in the business of empowering the people who use technology.

Now, it’s in the business of treating the people who use it as a source of fuel. We’re not the customer, we’re not even the product.

We’re a source of data that isn’t used to improve something for us. It’s used to manipulate whole populations.

In my mind, that is morally bankrupt, and I do not believe it can be fixed.

I think the way you get out of this is the way you always get out of tech problems,

which is you create an alternative universe with a different value system and you give people choices. (…)

Silicon Valley exists in an ecosystem globally, which sits there and says the only constituency that matters is the shareholder, and the only thing that management should care about are metrics.

Well, the reality is, ethics doesn’t stand a prayer in that environment. Because ethics, by definition, is the willingness to subordinate a metric to a higher value.”

Source: Recode Decode: Democracy is for sale, says “The Great Hack” director Karim Amer