fidacura

Jones aims to expose the hidden infrastructure beneath the shiny surface of the digital economy — it extends Marx's “hidden abode of production” into the present. The overall argument is a very important one, yet the writing is often very repetitive, and it touches the nerve of its subtopics without really pressing them, which felt frustrating, but it's a worthy short read nonetheless.

The book is a reminder of how Silicon Valley uses design, marketing, and vast amounts of capital to sell — often “offer” — dreamy, frictionless products and services, while at its core there's a labour infrastructure, hidden by design, built on populations devastated by war, civil unrest, and economic collapse; people excluded from anything that resembles proper employment.

At the core of the book there's a perverse irony exposed: one of the platforms that best embodies this hidden-labour reality, Amazon's Mechanical Turk, is named after an historical hoax; an 18th-century chess-playing “automaton” that toured the globe defeating grandmasters, before being exposed as a fraud: a cabinet with a grandmaster hidden inside, puppeteering its every move. Amazon chose that name knowingly. The overall picture speaks for itself.

What a tour de force — intimate and philosophically rich, tracing Lea's childhood through the last years of socialist Albania, and the turbulent dawn of liberalism. A meditation on identity, family, politics, and a haunting reflection on freedom, its meaning, and its many illusions.

A scientist creates the apocalypse out of mild curiosity; A prophet invents God because reality wasn't enough; A journalist takes notes the whole way down. Guess which one causes more damage — the whole human circus, destroying itself simply because it gets the chance to. 



PS: Vonnegut makes sure you're laughing all the way down.