Five Books Spoken about in America

The post-crisis U.S. wasn’t willingly listening to optimists in 2013.

Distance and major disappointment toward the utopianism of the past decade — the market, Internet, web democracy — all enlivened by the success of Silicon Valley and the triumphant march of neoconservatism, were present in reportage, academic studies and novels.

1. George Packer, “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America”

George Packer surely can’t be regarded as an optimist. In his story about the disintegration of America, “The Unwinding,” he adopts a total perspective — he is equally interested in the collapse of the steel industry and the success of self-help guides as in the fate of Tammy Thomas, a single mother living in Youngstown, a town which is gradually becoming desolated. The New Yorker journalist manages to create an engrossing and coherent narration from — it might seem — totally disconnected stories. He paints a very detailed crisis panorama anew, lending it an almost eschatological feature — different life choices, ambitions and political sympathies of his heroines invariably lead to one, fatal end.

For Packer the economic collapse is an implosion of a system built upon false promises. And for people who experience it — an ordeal of lost stability and prospects. Although there are no simple summaries or nostalgia for “the old, better days” in this book, Packer manages to work into it a very concrete moral: In the times of Roosevelt or Johnson we were able to withstand the crisis with more solidarity. Nowadays, when Oprah Winfrey convinced us that success depends on individual efforts, faith and work — we are leaving the crisis even more divided and selfish.

2. Evgeny Morozov, “To Save Everything, Click Here. The Folly of Internet Solutionism”

“We shouldn’t trust those promises of salvation of the world through technology that are proclaimed by Silicon Valley with the help of press spokesmen and female public relations experts,” writes Morozov.* “Solutionism,” that is, faith in simple, applicable, on-the-spot and omnipresent technological solutions, is an intellectual fiasco, perpetuated by our naivety toward “Internet with a capital ‘I.’”

Silicon Valley deceives us that another application will solve all problems of the world, but now it is preoccupied with such revolutionary ideas as making pizza deliveries to the residents of San Francisco easier and developing “smart” parking meters or calorie counters for smartphones. In what way will those things help 2 billion people living on less than a dollar and a half a day or 44 million Americans using food stamps?

Hosts of female and male professors repeat “truths” about the logic of the Internet that are convenient for investors and young millionaires — the Internet is thought to be a remedy for the old, lazy and ineffective democratic politics. But in reality they have nothing to offer except for a pop-culture mix of market feudalism and technological determinism, writes Morozov.

3. Katherine Losse, “The Boy Kings. A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network”

Kate Losse had been working for Facebook almost from the very beginning of its existence. In her opinion this good idea for a social network transformed into a system of surveillance, infringing on people’s privacy, and shallow self-presentation. It’s become like that because technological firms have the atmosphere of a men’s locker room. If social networks are designed by people with oversized egos, desensitized to any kinds of situations which cannot be written in the form of a code, it couldn’t have turned out another way. “The Boy Kings,” Losse’s diaries from the time when she was working for Facebook, was published back in 2012, but it began to be loudly discussed when its author established herself as the fiercest female critic of “Facebook feminism.”

Losse entered the polemic with Sheryl Sandberg, the author of another popular book from 2013, “Lean In.” Sandberg’s book, which parsed managerial episodes in every prominent Internet corporation, says that the problem of women in the labor market is not discrimination, lowered wages or the glass ceiling. The problem is that they are not able to listen to their inner voice, which would help them to finally succeed. Don’t count on the labor unions and the state, explains the author of “Lean In,” just start to plan your careers and start to establish female self-help circles … most preferably on Facebook.

In the meantime, Losse, who wrote for The Guardian and Dissent, consistently repeats that Silicon Valley is the last place where feminist postulates could be taken seriously. Women are hired here mostly to work in “nontechnical” posts, and are thus robbed of prestige and quite substantial privileges which are granted to the programmers. The extraordinary career of Sandberg, who keeps on telling women from the ruined Detroit that they have to start believing in themselves, only proves the rule.

4. Dave Eggers, “The Circle”

The description of Losse’s career at Facebook on the pages of “The Boy Kings” is nearly identical to the fate of Mae Holland, the heroine of Dave Eggers’ novel entitled “The Circle.” Both of them work in customer service — every day they have to respond to hundreds of emails containing questions regarding the network. Initially, both of them are enthusiastic — they are having a good time at corporate parties with exquisite catering and free alcohol. But while Losse gradually burns out observing the cynical policies of the firm and seeing how ideals preached by Mark Zuckerberg actually work in practice, Mae Holland stays faithful until the very end. Even when she sees that the Circle — a new social network, which is doing better than Twitter and Facebook — effectively destroys the notion of privacy. “All that happens must be known” — that’s one of the Circle’s slogans.

Americans, as described by Eggers, implicitly trust the technology, but not each other; to believe people are honest and competent, they need constant supervision and cameras. One of the recurring themes of “The Circle” is a compulsive need to measure everything — male and female citizens of the Circle get points for taking care of their health, sharing photographs or immediately and politely responding to emails. These points mean nothing outside the screen, but in the world of the Circle — where the most important thing is to show oneself at one’s best and to secure a good position in the social network — they decide just about everything.

5. Thomas Pynchon, “Bleeding Edge”

A portrait of a paranoid America — lost and seeking refuge in the media “underworlds” — is also presented by Thomas Pynchon in his novel “Bleeding Edge.” His heroes and heroines live in the gap between the dot-com bubble — the breakdown of the inflated Internet market in the late 90s — and 9/11. They are taken in by the most absurd things, they believe tricksters, their careers are based on equally uncertain ideas as those which got compromised when the bubble burst — yet nothing is able to sober them up.

In Pynchon’s world knowledge, information and media don’t free anyone, but only contribute toward even greater paranoia. In the pages of his books, fears of the end of the millennium come to life, namely cybermafias, hackers and conspiracies in the highest circles. We have to fear something, but we are almost never afraid of what really threatens us, suggests “Bleeding Edge.”

* Editor’s Note: This quote, accurately translated, could not be sourced.