A lot of people are writing and talking about this book already, but I want to practice putting a book review up here, so I will shrug and add to the pile.
The short version is that it's a fun, breezy book-length blogpost that packs together a lot of the essays and quips of the writer in one nice package. It is precisely the kind of book I prefer reading instead of blogs and tweets (I realize the hypocrisy of my blogging this). It reminds me most of the rash of 1990s-2000s real-talk pop-science books put out by the likes of Naomi Klein, Neil Postman, even what's his name, Malcolm Gladwell. There's a sincere if exhausted teacherly-voice in the writing, as these authors try to 'cut through' North American political and cultural tension and speak in a way they think is straight-forward and unpretentious.
I'll say that I like that just fine; it reeks of the late 1990s independent blogosphere as well as the mic-drop antics of early social media. Quips, insults, flak, stray shots fired at institutions or actors or dead politicians. And it's not such a new genre, this over-intelligent sprinting: GK Chesterton did a lot of the same at the turn of the last century. For no good reason I fell into a Chesterton binge during graduate school and I still recall the strange clarity of that 80-100 year old writing, the biting wit and pedestrian complaints. There's more of this, of course: the personal journals of Charles Darwin, the letters of Van Gogh, the less guarded writing of Sylvia Plath. In more recent times, Amartya Sen writes with stinging clarity, and I can't forget the revelation that was Susan Sontag's brevity and density.
Doctorow's work falls closer to the later writings of Neil Postman and Malcolm Gladwell, I would say, than to some of these other names. It's one of those calls-to-action. After reading it, I looked at jobs at government agencies that might regulate platforms; I really did. I'm usually petrified after reading books on race (Ibram X Kendi) or climate (Naomi Klein; Jonathan Safran Foers). These topics feel simultaneously overwhelming in scope and uncomfortably personal at the same time. I still read books like this, mind you, I am just saying I take about a week to recover.
Less so the works on finance (John Jay), economics (Ha-Joon Chang) or even Marxism (Ernest Mandel). Somehow journeys into the equally terrifying world of how humans make up money and abuse each other with it don't leave me feeling as depleted as the invention of race and destruction of the planet.
I'll stop name-dropping now. I think I've made the point of how I approach Doctorow's book: it's not a paralyzer, it's quippy and sharp, and it spins a nice blend of case studies with editorial ranting. I'd certainly recommend it to anyone looking for a crisp and clean voice to subvocalize whenever you read a headline about the latest abuses of Facebook or Amazon. Like Jon Stewart and his many, many offspring, the delivery is somewhere between flabbergasted documentarian and comedian desperate to get to their punchline. In this way, maybe, it's a crystallized hunk of 21st century North American rhetorical culture: sensitive and argumentative, narcissistic but philanthropic. Doctorow cares a lot about platforms but wants you to care the way that he cares; he wants his worldview out there as a viable alternative, an anchor around which collective action can take place. Perhaps in this he is not so different from civic voices of the past, or even spiritual leaders of the present: a bully at the pulpit, a preacher at the podium.
I haven't said much about what he actually says. Someone reading this would have little to no idea whether they might like the contents of the book.
He states digital platforms (Amazon, etc.) ought to be made less important in our lives. The Internet should revert in some ways to the more fungible and jungle-like forms it took on in the 1990s and early 2000s. Users should be able to back out of platforms, block entire sections off, not be harassed by ads so constantly and personally. In some ways, he asks for the volume to be turned down: less of the internet overall.
I agree with this wholeheartedly; I think this is his strongest argument by far. I don't know of anyone in the 2020s who is hungry for more internet. We are addicted, surely, but we know by now that that addiction is not evidence of real desire. It is manufactured, cultivated desire. I was attacked by social media first as a university student. I struggle with its temptations and stupidities daily. I cannot imagine how less equipped a 12 year old might be - that is, Facebook's 'minimum age requirement' for many years. With the internet, particularly social media, becoming so 'shitty' or low-quality in nature, Doctorow asking for less of it feels intuitively simple and frankly moral.
Piling on
I'll add to his thesis in what I hope are constructive ways. I think often these days of channel surfing. I spent a good part of the 1990s and 2000s developing this skill. Even basic television, with a dozen or so channels, allows for good channel surfing. Our family TV remote had a button for skipping back to the previous channel - I don't remember now what it was labeled. Return? Recall? Previous? My standard strategy was to find two 'good' things I wanted to watch and, whenever one of the channels ran an ad, I would skip over to the other. I could spend an entire afternoon doing things, watching 80% of movies or TV shows in pretty poor quality broadcast - fuzzy, snowy, etc.
This practice was common enough to not ever be mentioned out loud. I saw friends do it, family members, relatives, and even other people in movies or on TV doing it. The entire world knew TV sucked, but we couldn't or wouldn't stop watching. By the time I was in my teens, I'd had more than enough of television; I spent evenings playing music or video games instead - activities not interrupted by irrelevant advertisements.
I won't dive into how social media narrow casts and algorithmically sorts and targets us, so that ads can no longer be called 'irrelevant'. Technology rotates, not revolutionizes, the world. What we face with social media is not a new era of advertising in which our every desire is anticipated and met. It's rather an old era of propaganda in which our every desire is manufactured and decided for us. You do not really want that t-shirt you see on Instagram; your want has been drummed up by the passivity of scrolling through fashionable imagery, and you are being baited now into feeling 'active' by purchasing something.
Let's not wander too far from Doctorow's book, though. What he writes about echoes Bagdikian or McChesney of the broadcast TV era: too few owners making cultural institutions into purely economic ones, and the political ramifications of doing so. Doctorow is saying very plainly that there is both too much social media/Internet, and too few owners of the channels we can surf between. The platform cartel, like the broadcast TV cartel before it, cannot hope to effectively capture, deliver, or promote real cultural progress. At a high level of concentration, owners can only narrowly fixate on extracting greater profits or, as Doctorow points out, rent in the form of charging end users money to interact with one another.
Channel surfing is too much like doom scrolling to ignore, and its legacy as a cultural practice is likewise similar: in the 1990s we joked openly about zoning out, wasting time, watching trash, and becoming ironically and then unironically obsessed with the disposal content made mostly to fill time between ads (instead of the other way around). Social media is, in some familiar and oddly comfortable ways, simply taking up the mantle of trash television. YouTube is more like the bad TV of the 1990s than ever before. This is not because the quality of content has overall gotten worse, but that the frequency and intensity of advertising has gotten greater. Social media is simply progressing towards the endpoint of all capitalist ventures: advertising.
So in this way, what Doctorow is describing is another chapter in media history that echoes the ones that came before: an exciting development in communications technology followed by far-reaching and dramatic prognostications of what it could mean (remember that in the 1960s and 1970s a lot of people thought television might replace education; e.g., Sesame Street). A brief experimental era follows (Postman details 1950s TV-theatre for an example), followed by an increase in revenue-seeking as the broadcasters need to 'keep the lights on'. As good money-making schemes are worked out, the networks grow and buy or kill each other, until we arrive at the 1990s stage, the late stage if you want, wherein all the good things about the medium are pretty well exhausted (the best of TV was Seinfeld; the best of Social Media was the 2010s), and it all gets stuck in a holding pattern if or until better versions come along to challenge it, however slightly (HBO does good stuff, but it hasn't killed reality TV; Mastodon is more interesting than Twitter, but both still exist).
The best support for Doctorow's work, and others of a similar mind, is that in the 2020s we have better cultural language for expressing how bored but addicted we are to social media - just like we did in the late 1990s regarding television. It is not odd or strange to bemoan our doom scrolling and time sinks, our parasocial habits, or our shopping mistakes. We're not free of these addictions, but we admit we have a problem. In the 2000s and even into the 2010s, people believed social media was either just for fun (e.g., the sublime humor of memes) or genuinely politically liberating (#yeswecan, etc.). Now it's hard to make either argument. Memes and hashtag campaigns, in whatever mutated forms, still predominate social media, but they lack the sense of 'progress' and cultural gravity they had just 5-6 years ago.
This is a good, maybe great thing. No privately owned media broadcaster should be considered the center of culture and the arbiter of politics. Not newspapers, radio, TV, or internet. Culture should have as many channels of transmission as it does shapes and forms. It's a good thing that Zuckerberg and Musk have been unmasked as bizarre, freakish individuals with little to no grasp of everyday life and concerns. If you wouldn't trust them to cook an egg, why would you trust them to moderate free speech? We can safely shift them from the mythical status of 'self-made' and 'visionary' to 'privileged' and 'out of touch'. Sadly, until they shoot themselves into space, we cannot say goodbye to them.
That last paragraph is probably as close as I'll want to get in this book review to Doctorow's own genre of writing. I'll mention again that GK Chesterton has a massive treasure trove of early 20th century blogs well worth checking out, if one enjoys this genre.
I'll end here: I hope there are fewer books like Doctorow's and more legislature instead. I hope the case studies he mentions proliferate in number and kind across many countries. I hope he is correct that the tide has turned or, I think more accurately, cultural and political understandings have at last caught up to social media's true nature (roughly 20 years into its reign, we are seeing what kind of king it is). Bans for smartphones for children; limits on accounts for teens; real accountability for moderation failures; decreases in rent-seeking by mediators. These and other good ideas need to move from the pop-science shelf to the governmental agenda, and Doctorow's work is an excellent step towards that transition.