THE ONE AND THE NINETY-NINE: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion, your words aside Religion is not a good answer to Society's ills

THE ONE AND THE NINETY-NINE: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion
LUKE BURGIS
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: How to become yourself without losing everyone else.

We’re living in a time when it’s harder than ever to become a whole person—and to stay in authentic community. Some people dissolve into their group identities and lose themselves entirely. Others withdraw into ephemeral, online collectives they can float into and out of without consequence. Both are symptoms of the same a fragmented sense of self in an age of social contagion. This fragmentation is more than a personal crisis—it’s the soil in which hollow and often dangerous mass movements take root, offering counterfeit belonging to those desperate for meaning.

The One and the Ninety-Nine is a timely and inspiring exploration of what it means to forge a stable identity in the face of coercion, conformity, and the contagious desires of the crowd. Through compelling and original insights drawn from philosophy, psychology, and personal experience, author Luke Burgis examines how our lives are shaped by the groups we belong to—and how we, in turn, shape those groups. He offers a roadmap for engaging with modern society without losing our unique sense of personhood, and reveals the essential rites of passage and personal challenges that differentiate a life of meaning from one dictated by societal expectations.

People who are able to find their solid self and thrive in the space between the one and the many—who can act with integrity while being part of a community—live freer and more comfortable lives and become models for others. The One and the Ninety-Nine is a call to reject passive conformity, rediscover the depth of personality, and choose a life that is both truly personal and deeply connected.

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My Review: I don't approve of religion in general; I have an abiding bone-deep dislike for christians in particular, as a gay man with no interest in "overcoming my sinful nature" or whatever other nonsense "They" spew at me to coerce me into feeling a need to placate "Them" by behaving in a way comfortable to "Them." So when the author admitted to being a christian in the first few pages of the book, I set it aside with no intention of finishing the DRC.

I'm very worried about the undesigned social experiment we as a society are running in the form of algorithmically-mediated social media. I don't trust the tech scum to design the algorithms with the betterment of a person, but a bottom line, as its goal. Ample evidence of the role greed plays in the industry makes me all but positive no attention is paid to human needs when designing systems used by all of us.

Those two prior things are causally linked. I finished reading The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (qv) and got more urgently agitated by what I read there; I recalled the DRC of this book, dealing with forming an authentic self. I opened it back up to see what I could glean.

Lots of christian nonsense. Parables and Bible quotes galore. Stating that (in his opinion, to be fair stated as such) people are more selfish now after *heavily*implying* the reason is we're more secular/less christian. Which...well...who's selfish, my dude? the people doing their best to navigate the world in ways you don't like, or you for saying your religion has The Answers to making people better and more empathetic? (Leave aside The Troubles, in the Ireland where you start your book, were an intra-christian spat that's half a millennium old.)

So no, I'm no big fan of his, nor did I think his shepherd/sheep needing rescue framing was anything other than seriously condescending.

But.

He's correct. The education system carefully indoctrinates us to accept Authority and seek conformity. It's a real thing, intentionally designed to do what we see around us: create sheeple. It's been done by his co-religionists for millennia now, to equally destructive effect, not ever acknowledged or examined by him. It's a giant problem for every society throughout time. Cohesion good, public morality good, conformity and scapegoating bad. Since christianity is a major source of both pressure to conform and assigning blame onto Others (those who don't pray like you, sexual-behavioral minorities, the Devil) I think it takes big brass ones not to examine *that* in great detail while quietly assuming the adding-back of religion will go a long way to fixing the very real problem he's identified.

I admire you, Brother Luke, for being so vulnerable and forthcoming about your experiences with your father's dementia. It was very moving. It was a long struggle, of course, and from the inside must've felt interminable. I do not think it was quite the connective tissue you intended it to be. It was rather more confessional than professional.

I did not, in other words, find solutions I want to support or even effect to the very real, well-stated societal stressors I'm eager to address. It's not likely to fix things by doing yet again things that helped society fracture before now.

YESTERYEAR, debut novel perfect for book clubs...and Anne Hathaway as Natalie comin' soon!

YESTERYEAR
CARO CLAIRE BURKE
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A traditional American woman, a beautiful wife and mother who sells her pioneer lifestyle of raw milk and farm-fresh eggs to her millions of social media followers, suddenly awakens cold, filthy, and terrified in the brutal reality of 1805—where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel.

My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.

Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the Republican equivalent of a Kennedy? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it.

Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a brutal reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible.

A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: What a rotten human being Natalie is, phony, all about surfaces and appearances. And then one day, she's required to put in the effort she's faked for life as a momfluencer/farmfluencer. Remember Overboard, the 1987 film? Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell as truly terrible people, lying, cheating, using people around them as objects. This story reminded me of that, with Outlander as the backdrop.

There is a thing called a "tradwife" on the internet. It's as brummagem as the "manosphere" the right-wing owners of major media outlets likes to insist is worthy of attention so their employees yap on about it. Natalie and Caleb, her husband, are mouthpieces for this made-up cultural phenomenon. As will surprise no one over forty, the couple are complete fakes: the lifestyle they present as aspirational, as somehow attainable, is a profit-driven collective endeavor of many minions and two public faces, supported by a cast of their minor children exploited as accessories, as decorative objects.

If any of this sounds familiar, it should. It's got elements of the whole Ruby Franke debacle, the various terrible men in the right-wing talk circles, the young kids trying to be famous on YouTube because that's what they see as fame...none of this is different than it's ever been. Classes, courses, camps, schools teching acting, writing, cooking...mor acccurately chefing...all have done this since who-knows-when but certainly since Carême parlayed his successes serving super-fancy vittles to the power elite of the Napoleonic era into a publishing empire. Others came before, I'm sure. Humans like looking up to people who do things flamboyantly and publicly because the spectacle is fun, because we like novelty, because we enjoy the inevitable fall from the heights. I myownself have never felt more intense schadenfreude than I did at the fall of Beau Brummell. The word "comeuppance" was only coined in 1859, but might as well have been invented for him...and for Natalie.

As Natalie awakens to the reality of her comeuppance, she becomes...authentic, at least briefly, in her intense desire to get back to being artificial, groomed, and pampered. She'll take the misogyny, the fakery of her persona's religious trappings, wrap herself in the cocoon of decepetions if it will bring her back to luxury behind the cameras. The hollow and unsatisfying Caleb of the modern day? Fine, compared to the sterner and more effortful relationship with her nineteenth-century Caleb; and how the hell does anyone get raised in a world without nannies? Natalie doesn't want to know.

I'm painting a portrait of a woman as obsessed with surfaces and self-absorbed as any Dorian Gray. She is just as awful as he was. We know this because we hear her inner monologue. We are left in no doubt that her responses are genuine because there is no camera to play to, no audience except us, the invisible readers she is speaking to.

I am definitely the audience for this story: anti-religion, revolted by the fameseeking culture depicted herein, accepting of a premise that promises weirdness in the form of time travel. But there are limits. Yes, Natalie and Caleb exist in the world...Ballerina Farm...but this story's got to do more than regurgitate the headlines to succeed. Does Author Burke have anything to add to the conversation? Or are we here for the fun of Natalie's comeuppance? The ending is designed to offer that perspective, I think, but it did not land with me. That's why I only offer four stars.

Not being perfect, not sticking the landing is not in any way meant to vitiate the real pleasures of the read. It's the kind of story that book clubs will engage with eagerly, much to chew on, much to consuder. I think you're wise to pick it up in that context; this is a story best experienced as a catalyst of discussion.

Debuts that attract Anne Hathaway to adapt and then star in their film are rare. I see why this one won that lottery. Find a group to read it with!

A COMPLETE FICTION, even the title has sneaky, hidden levels!

A COMPLETE FICTION
R.L. MAIZES
Ig Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: With little evidence, would-be author P.J. Larkin serves a "nibble" on the trendy new social-media app Crave, accusing editor George Dunn of stealing the novel she submitted to him for publication. The nibble shoots to the top of the site's Popular Menu Items and before you can say "unpaid literary labor," George is embroiled in a scandal, his job and book deal in jeopardy. P.J.’s novel is snapped up amid the publicity, but has she revealed secrets belonging to her sister, Mia, in the book? Some diners on Crave think so and now it’s P.J.’s turn to feel the public’s scorn.

Told in the humorous vein of Where'd You Go, Bernadette?, A COMPLETE FICTION examines the very serious questions of who has a right to tell a story, and has cancel culture gone too far in our social media-drenched world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Bitterly funny takedown/send-up of the corrosive world-view promoted by the algorithms of "engagement" that tech scum have foisted on social media users.

A writer manquée takes umbrage at a writer-editor (dangerous combination) publishing a novel that she feels is closely based on her own rejected novel. She stirs up a firestorm of outrage by accusing the male editor of plagiarism. The entire little world of this (invented; also brilliant, someone get on developing this!) app erupts! The consequences are multivarious, and serious, for all concerned.

Using social media is something most of us do, in 2025 in the US anyway. We're increasingly dependent on it. Without it, stuck in a place I can't physically leave with any ease or comfort, I'd go insane from boredom. Yet I see frequent idiocy plagues run rife on many platforms, as well as the darker side of the world of these apps that spy on us via "cookies" and increasingly via "AI" moderation. It's a world run by algorithms. These do not, in and of themselves, present a problem; it's the scum that decide how the algorithms should be written that present an existential threat to civil discourse.

In the publishing industry, plagiarism accusations are taken very seriously. It's shocking to me that more of the opposition to "AI"'s rise isn't centered very publicly, very loudly, and outside industry circles around the reality that it's trained on plagiarized material. Nonetheless, the use of this colossal, often career-blemishing accusation as the basis of this tale is heartening. It is not a "yes he did it" or a "she made this accusation in bad faith" story. It really delves into the complicated reality of emotional reality not meshing with consensus reality. It offers a chance to examine how deeply the roots of creativity entwine with personal identity. How very toxic anything can become when it attacks, as you see it, the roots of your identity. How deeply unwise, how destructive, how of necessity unfair, it is for outsiders to take sides and form mobs about things they can't know in detail sufficient to warrant such partisanship.

In this way, Author Maizes skewers our cultural moment's absence of perspective. She offers us alternating perspectives. She makes each writer take a turn in her narrative hot seat because "nobody's perfect" isn't a nostrum for defusing conflict by accident. In the end, however, I was enlightened by this technique more than I was drawn to invest in the characters by it. I had no sympathy for PJ and fairly little for George at any given moment, yet their imbroglio compelled my attention throughout the read.

So while I can't offer a full fifth star, I can say I was eager to come back to the read every time I had to put it down, and had the fun I badly needed while reading this pretty scathing story. No one, especially not the reader, comes out of this fight unscarred.

Very much a recommended read.

THEM: The best time to pay attention was twenty-five years ago; second-best is now

THEM: Adventures with Extremists
JON RONSON
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link
$18.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the bestselling author of The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry and So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.

Them began as a book about different kinds of extremists, but after Jon had got to know some of them—Islamic fundamentalists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen—he found that they had one oddly similar belief: that a tiny, shadowy elite rule the world from a secret room.

In Them, Jon sets out, with the help of the extremists, to locate that room. The journey is as creepy as it is comic and, along the way, Jon is chased by men in dark glasses, unmasked as a Jew in the middle of a Jihad training camp, and witnesses international CEOs and politicians participate in a bizarre pagan ritual in the forests of northern California.

Them is a fascinating and entertaining exploration of extremism, in which Jon learns some alarming things about the looking-glass world of "them" and "us". Are the extremists on to something? Or has Jon become one of THEM?

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM THE PRIME LENDING SERVICE. USE THEM OFTEN, THEY PAY AUTHORS FOR OUR USE.

My Review: Twenty-plus years on, this book isn't obsolete.

I've never typed a sadder, more fraught sentence in the entirety of my life. Details are outdated, but that in no way invalidates Author Ronson's analysis (though it chops a half-star off...time for a new edition!)

Alex Jones was utterly exposed as the lunatic bigot he really is in this book long before Sandy Hook blew that closet door off its hinges, and yet this complete careful takedown had no effect on his ability to convince people to invest in his idiocy.

In his experience, detailed in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (q.v.), people have taken old-fashioned social organization with them into the digital age. The conspiracy theorists of today have a long lineage of hatred for the Jews, a long-standing mistrust of Authority (except of course for themselves; after all, they know The Truth℠, everyone else is a sad little dupe of Them), and no longer have to have a public owning of their nutjobbery.

Emotional dysregulation is far easier to run out of control in parasocial interactions with authority, or authoritative, figures. These are ever-more common events in our social lives as more and more time is spent in internet-mediated contact...post-pandemic there is a huge increase in time spent in and effect of parasocial relationships, which is only exacerbating the ongoing radicalization of younger men in Western society.

Author Ronson, trained as a journalist, is very much a careful observer of the people he speaks to; he does not come right out and say "that was a lie" but he very carefully notes what tells an observant listener and/or reader what marks something out as, in fact, a lie. Staying alert to subtext is, after all, a big part of a journalist's brief...another reason why "They" want fewer trained journalists in the world. It's part of a truly unnerving perversion of the truism that all of us together are smarter than any one of us alone...phrased best by Mark Twain: "When you set aside mere names & come down to realities, you find that we are ruled by a King just as other absolute monarchies are. His name is The Majority. He is mighty in bulk & strength ... He rules by the right of possessing less money & less brains & more ignorance than the other competitor for the throne, The Minority. Ours is an Absolute Monarchy." (Mark Twain at Large, Arthur L. Scott, p. 96-97.)

The jaws of the trap "They" have spent fifty years building, slowly and carefully, are springing shut. I do not know if there is still time to wedge a stick of sturdy truthtelling in them.

I'm sure gonna give it a whirl.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THEM: Why We Hate Each Other—and How to Heal
BEN SASSE
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing American Adult, an intimate and urgent assessment of the existential crisis facing our nation.

Something is wrong. We all know it.

American life expectancy is declining for a third straight year. Birth rates are dropping. Nearly half of us think the other political party isn’t just wrong; they’re evil. We’re the richest country in history, but we’ve never been more pessimistic. What’s causing the despair?

In Them, bestselling author and U.S. Senator Ben Sasse argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, our crisis isn’t really about politics. It’s that we’re so lonely we can’t see straight—and it bubbles out as anger.

Local communities are collapsing. Across the nation, little leagues are disappearing, Rotary clubs are dwindling, and in all likelihood, we don’t know the neighbor two doors down. Work isn’t what we’d hoped: less certainty, few lifelong coworkers, shallow purpose. Stable families and enduring friendships—life’s fundamental pillars—are in statistical freefall.

As traditional tribes of place evaporate, we rally against common enemies so we can feel part of on a team. No institutions command widespread public trust, enabling foreign intelligence agencies to use technology to pick the scabs on our toxic divisions. We’re in danger of half of us believing different facts than the other half, and the digital revolution throws gas on the fire.

There’s a path forward—but reversing our decline requires something radical: a rediscovery of real places and real human-to-human relationships. Even as technology nudges us to become rootless, Sasse shows how only a recovery of rootedness can heal our lonely souls.

America wants you to be happy, but more urgently, America needs you to love your neighbor. Fixing what’s wrong with the country depends on you rebuilding right where you’re planted.

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My Review: I'm allergic to old-fashioned neighborliness, community-building exercises, the idea that living in the same zip code says something fundamental about my connection to people.

In days of yore, that would've marked me out as weird. Now that makes me...for the first time in my adult life...mainstream. And what did Mark Twain say about about agreeing with the majority? "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect)."

I doubt I can change much, but others? There's hope for them and by extension all of us.

That Author Sasse is a Republican should tell anyone who knows me everything I need to convey by reporting positive agreement with his prescription for what ails the US body politic. (Also, per Wikipedia, Senator Sasse: "{o}n February 13, 2021, ...was one of seven Republican senators to vote to convict Donald Trump of incitement of insurrection in his second impeachment trial."} Go former Senator Sasse!)

The anomie and isolation of seemingly the majority of young people is absolutely terrifying. What Author Sasse posits as solutions earn all my four stars. His framing of the problems we face is resolutely inside the educated elite PoV one would expect from a lifelong academic and former Senator. Only in the funhouse mirror of US politics is this man in any way a centrist. He is also not wrong.

Many of the rights and norms Author Sasse identified as under threat in this 2018 book, eg the inalienable rights of all individuals including habeas corpus, and the freedom of conscience and the right to exercise it in private life (the Dobbs decision rises before my appalled eyes),have been explicitly targeted by the current administration. It's been a long, slow process to dumb down and distract people away from the assault on our institutions of trust and collective action. Look at Project 2025's digital ghosts.

A big part of that process has been the demonization and politicization of Others. When someone is Other, they're not protected like you should be, or protected from you like they should be. A long and successful campaign to convince people "They" are a threat to decency and rightness has been waged by the real "Them" the actual political operators of the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and so on.

Destroying the people's willingness to see each other as real, decent people who might disagree on things but who nonetheless have a lot in common, or divide and conquer, has been the colonizer's, the fascist's, the authoritarian's cornerstone strategy for millennia. It hasn't stopped working yet.

You, as an individual, have to stop falling for it in order to defeat it.

Read some of Sasse's ideas and try them out.

THE STRANGEST, or "Meursault for the Modern Cyberworld"...outstanding!

THE STRANGEST
MICHAEL J. SEIDLINGER
O/R Books
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Michael Seidlinger has dared tackle one of the literary classics of the 20th century literature and reimagined it for the 21st: and in Albert Camus’ anti-hero Meursault, at once apathetic and violent, unable to connect with his fellow humans, Seidlinger exhumes a perfect metaphor for the Internet Generation. Zachary Weinham, anchorless in terms of morals and committed to nothing except commenting on comments and their comments etc., finds himself involved in the sinister machinations of Rios, someone he meets in a bar, and allows himself to be set up—whether out of apathy or a desire for self-destruction it’s hard to tell. A murder ensues. Shunned by his friends and associates, not sure of what he has gotten into, Zachary heads for confrontation with society—and his own moral values.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Routine blog readers will recall Michael Seidlinger's name. The Fun We've Had was 2014's 6-stars-of-five read; Mother of a Machine Gun, a novella deconstructing Identity and Motherhood from a son's perspective; Falter Kingdom, Anybody Home?, all of them four star-plus reads for me. This book's appeal to me wasn't as immediate or as visceral as the other reads were. I'm somewhat trapped in Meursault's Otherness via Camus. Exploring his identity further didn't necessarily strike me as urgent, and there's nothing Michael Seidlinger creates that stops short of Urgency.

I've said of him before:

Every writer needs a trope. Seidlinger's is musical brevity. He'd be called a poet if he made less sense.
–and–
Seidlinger is what a mating between Djuna Barnes and Samuel Beckett would've produced: Illusionless in his pessimism, joyful in his schadenfreude, and both human and humane enough to wrap his bitter pills in pretty words.

I stand by those words, I believe them to be fair in their assessment of his talent and his presentation of it. So this book? It came out almost a decade ago and...I wasn't a fan, exactly, because...well...Meursault.

In my never-ending quest to tie up loose ends, since I can't tie Michael up but *can* finish reviewing the DRCs of his work that I have, I thought a real review of this book to end 2022 would feel condign.

When taking on classics, there are two ways to approach them from a positive energy field: Hommage or retelling. Leave it to a poet to say, "naaah," and enter into a dialogue with the piece. The Stranger, subject of Camus's astonishing and ever-fresh novella of Meursault's crime and punishment, is now about Zachary, The Strangest...the man, like Guy is to Bruno from Strangers on a Train, whose blankness is observing the surfaces of a mediated landscape with no concrete referents. Only what is outside The Strangest is real. This, of course, means he has no reality because his internal world is only the external world reflected on the shiny, frictionless surfaces of his many mirrors. Like a human Hubble Space Telescope, he has only the visible light of distant, unreachable reality to furnish meaning and encourage existence.

What makes that so dangerous is visible in the social-media obsessed, whipped to a froth "activism" and "radicalization" of many, many empty shells with AR-15s. Nothing outside can give a person a core, as Camus made plain in Meursault's completely avoidable descent into murder. And here, though it's framed by a modern concern unknown to the Camus of 1944, we're going down the same rabbit-hole. No core? Barely a shell! Constantly obsessed with fitting in, The Strangest isn't ever going to achieve that.

"For a line to exist, it would first have to be crossed."

You can't fit if you have no shape.

And that is the thing, in 2015, Michael Seidlinger saw and said that, to my slight embarrassment, I did not pay enough attention to. The way that Meursault would go along the hot and sandy beach in Algeria to get along was fundamentally different from The Strangest's endlessly, heatlessly reflective but never reflexive attempts to build Reality from the weak material of light. There is no real reason not to murder someone, a lot of someones in fact, if there is no texture or heft to the world for you. It's light, from a screen or from a geometric solid, it's only light and therefore has only the meaning your analysis gives it.

If light and its shadows are all you possess, there is no reason to obsess over life and fate and pain and grief. Death is only the light going out, only the local light covered or extinguished. Light still exists. Shadows and darkness aren't real.

Maybe one of the most chilling meditations I've read in 2022. I can't call it perfect...it's cold and disconnected, so doesn't make the impact something so impartant should...but I can call it excellent. Highly recommended for serious thinkers about twenty-first century life and society.

THE TWITTER PAGE: TWITTER: A Biography, love-letter to bygone days & TWITTER AND TEAR GAS: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, what we're losing even now

TWITTER AND TEAR GAS: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest
ZEYNEP TUFEKCI
Yale University Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$11.54 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From New York Times opinion columnist Zeynep Tufekci, a firsthand account and incisive analysis of the role of social media in modern protest

To understand a thwarted Turkish coup, an anti–Wall Street encampment, and a packed Tahrir Square, we must first comprehend the power and the weaknesses of using new technologies to mobilize large numbers of people. An incisive observer, writer, and participant in today’s social movements, Zeynep Tufekci explains in this accessible and compelling book the nuanced trajectories of modern protests—how they form, how they operate differently from past protests, and why they have difficulty persisting in their long-term quests for change.

Tufekci speaks from direct experience, combining on-the-ground interviews with insightful analysis. She describes how the internet helped the Zapatista uprisings in Mexico, the necessity of remote Twitter users to organize medical supplies during Arab Spring, the refusal to use bullhorns in the Occupy Movement that started in New York, and the empowering effect of tear gas in Istanbul’s Gezi Park. These details from life inside social movements complete a moving investigation of authority, technology, and culture—and offer essential insights into the future of governance.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM THE LIBRARY. USE THEM OFTEN, OUR PATRONAGE IS THEIR JOB SECURITY.

My Review: What with Musky Twitter becoming a real thing and then "reassuring" advertisers that "Twitter cannot become a free-for-all hellscape" while then saying that "Fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise," all of which pretty much add up to something just like a hellscape to me, minus the "free" part.

What went right about this read for me as a reader was its blend of "I-was-there" anecdotal reports and a sociologist's academic assessment of what leads the riled-up masses to fail in achieving their aim. As they are not conflated, as in attributing to her eyewitness statements the weight and force of academic analysis, I found them mutually enriching to my read. I was equally convinced that the author was, in openly acknowledging her left-leaning bias and explaining why it informed her analysis, transparent in reaching her conclusions.

Since the advent of social media in the Aughties, we've undergone a startling tectonic shift in the public conversation about politics and current events. Loud voices (eg Alex Jones) predominate; their usually right-wing extremism (save the both-sides and what-about crap, it's more effort than I care to spend to debunk their fundamental wrongness politely) echoes and echoes while picking up force without ever gaining any meaning or truth. Alex Jones's lies about Sandy Hook are going to cost him nearly a billion bucks which he doesn't have, and is proof that Author Tufekci's central thesis is correct: Attention is the main currency of social-media movements, not information which was at the heart of previous propaganda drives. If Jones's grip on the attention of millions hadn't been so finely tuned and thus successful, the bogus information he was peddling would've vanished in its own ripples. Revolutionaries using social media to spread their word have succeeded insofar as they've grabbed attention and even inspired action based on it...but have failed to make consolidatable gains in opposition to their enemies because that step requires information to reach people ill-equipped to comprehend or act on it.

This last fact, evidenced by the failures of many current social-media-driven movements, are failures to create systems and get buy-in from the protestors. There are no "network internalities," a term I learned from reading the book that's basically the opposite of the well-known term "network externalities", derived from the easy and showy online "organizing" that barely outlasts the social media post. In olden days, when organizing was a rough and effortful slog of meeting after meeting after committee upon speech-giving bloviation, the fact that 500 people showed up to a protest said something very loud about how this message they organized around resonated with them. Now that the message is reduced to an attention-grabbing snippet to get your engagement to it in place of simply doomscrolling on, there's very little investment on the consumer's part.

Another signal failure on the reliance of protests on social media is the interruptibility of attention-based engagement as opposed to information-based buy-in. The model she uses for this is the Tea Party...an online scattering of loudly outraged racist scum (my term, not the author's) whose "movement" (in the same sense as "bowel" in my never-humble opinion) transcended the attention-based group's ephemerality by embracing older techniques of protest: accepting hierarchical thinking, coalescing their ideas into clearly stated goals, etc. They've been stunningly successful in fomenting their ignorant, evil, putrid "ideas" and getting mainstream buy-in for them. More's the pity. The strength they rely on for their success is pounding away at the attention-grabbing "messaging" while accepting the behind-the-scenes scaffolding of disciplined application of information-based knowledge.

It's a model for success against the effective countering of the attention-grabbing social media rebellion: Drown the attention out in a flood of irrelevant, often false, and designed to distract "information." It is a very effective technique, as current political tragedies have shown again and again. Records, as in "lists of factual things," are judged fake insofar as they disagree with the hearer's agenda, and thus require time and effort to deny, explain, or simply distract from in return. That's time not spent doing the real job. And that is he entire plan for success of the right-wing nightmare machine.

Academics aren't going to like this abbreviated treatment of the topics the author covers, or appreciate the absence in-book of notes and a bibliography. Lay readers aren't going to be thrilled that the author doesn't spoon-feed them conclusions that agree with their established prejudices. But if you invest in the author's central thesis, the revolution that can be televised is doomed to co-opting and failure, there is a lot to be learned from discovering why and why you should care. That's the point of the book. It makes its point very well indeed. And, as #Midterms2022 approach, it behooves us all as voters to learn what our manipulators want us *not* to see, to attend to.

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TWITTER: A Biography
JEAN BURGESS and NANCY K. BAYM
NYU Press
$13.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The sometimes surprising, often humorous story of the forces that came together to shape the central role Twitter now plays in contemporary politics and culture

Is Twitter a place for sociability and conversation, a platform for public broadcasting, or a network for discussion? Digital platforms have become influential in every sphere of communication, from the intimate and everyday to the public, professional, and political. Since the scrappy startup days of social media in the mid-2000s, not only has the worldwide importance of platforms grown exponentially, but also their cultures have shifted dramatically, in a variety of directions. These changes have brought new opportunities for progressive communities to thrive online, as well as widespread problems with commercial exploitation, disinformation, and hate speech.

Twitter's growth over the past decade, like that of much social media, has far surpassed its creators' vision. Twitter charts this trajectory in the format of a platform biography: a new, streamlined approach to understanding how platforms change over time. Through the often surprising, fast-moving story of Twitter, it illuminates the multiple forces—from politics and business to digital ideologies—that came together to shape the evolution of this revolutionary platform. Jean Burgess and Nancy K. Baym build a rich narrative of how Twitter has evolved as a technology, a company, and a culture, from its origins as a personal messaging service to its transformation into one of the most globally influential social media platforms, where history and culture is not only recorded but written in real time.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The hashtag. The @. RTs and subtweets and "blue" (actually white) checkmarks. All of the detritus, or furnishings if one is feeling charitable, of social media are Twitter-invented or -popularized. It's a simple, basic idea, Twitter: Let people bloviate for a limited space (pictures added sometime in the 10s) about anything they want and let them find each other, build communities (and form lynch mobs), coordinate revolutions, all via the hashtag. TikTok was called Vine, and introduced by Twitter before their idiot management shuttered it. I got my Twitter account in 2007. Reading a tweet of mine is most likely why you're reading this review.

Now #MuskyTwitter is trending and this very concise book, only two-and-a-half years old, needs a second edition.

What I enjoyed most about the authors' treatment of the history of Twitter is that they were as focused as a good tweet-thread. They didn't succumb to bashing or whitewashing Twitter's many quirks. Aesthetically Twitter's changed itself, and the social-media world, the most. It's not like it's a design-heavy UI, right?

Wrong.

Twitter's look, and its effect on your engagement, is carefully calculated. It's part of a subtle message...stay, look, seek and find...that messages a deep sense of satisfaction with the activity itself, the results really are secondary to Twitter. So why is Twitter so awful at generating money from advertising? Ask Elon, he seems to know...but seriously, Twitter's main issue has always been about defining itself, when the authors contend (and I agree) that the three features in the first line of my review actually made Twitter a mutiple personality. There's a way to use each of those features to reinforce one's group identity...BookTwitter, HorrorTwitter, BlackTwitter...and thus make a broad-based ad-watching public pretty elusive. Creating ads for small, not-very-numerous communities isn't usually cost effective.

And here's Elon, steppin' into the buzz-saw. Heh.

What these Australian academics set out to do was set a protocol for biographizing (my ugly word, not theirs) technology. Take it innovation by innovation, look at the drivers of the innovations and the results from their adoption and/or morphing uses. They'll lead to larger conclusions about the platform, its users, and the social-media-verse we and they all exist within.

My idea of a well-presented technology book. Not too long, not loaded with tedious jargon, and not so basic as to cause me to wish it was just an owner's manual not an actual book. I liked the read, I liked the methods the authors used, and I enjoyed myself all the way through. (Except the endnotes, I didn't read those.)