Torie Bosch

Fourteen good stories, some of them great, all investigating the possible consequences (utopia or dystopia or in-between) of some technology already in play now in the 2010s and 2020s.

Like with most antholologies, one or two stories left me scratching my head, not sure what they were about, where they took place, whether they were lacking or were beyond my limited ability to understand them - even though, scene by scene, they all did keep my interest.

Analee Newitz's "When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis" was one of the best sci-fi stories I've read in a while.

Charlie Jane Anders "The Minnesota Diet" ends the book in a quirky but satisfyingly upbeat way.… (meer)

Fact #1: As a rule, I refuse to DNF books. I would estimate that the ratio of books which I put down and say, “Nope, I'm done.” is about 1:150. I put books down all the time, but that's because I read like an ADHD howler monkey on cocaine, surrounded by the many shiny objects which comprise our ever-increasing shared literary heritage. My intent is always to pick them back up at a later date.

Fact #2: As a rule, I do not write reviews of books which I have not read front to back.

Fact #3: I have no problem viewing women as equals, and in the case of individual skills, betters. I've never understood the need to denigrate women. Accuse me of misogyny if you want — and some will want to by the end of this review — but I have no problem with the ongoing sexual revolution.

Fact #4: I was very much in the mood for an intellectually stimulating book on programming, a perhaps philosophical smorgasbord of interesting and at times fascinating essays and stories about the history of computers and that surprisingly engaging pastime some of us engage in known as programming.

Fact #5: This book — or what I read of it — seems to be (wait for it…) an intellectually stimulating book on programming, a perhaps philosophical smorgasbord of interesting and at times fascinating essays and stories about the history of computers and that surprisingly engaging pastime some of us engage in known as programming.

Fact #6: But the women (and perhaps some men) involved in the production of this book ruined it. Instead what we have is actually a smokescreen. The authors and most certainly the editors of the book wanted you to think this was a book about programming but actually this was a book about the contributions of women to programming, and any actual entertainment value derived from the book about the fascinating subject of programming was purely accidental. They had an ax to grind and they ground it at every available opportunity.

Fact #7: If they had written a book about the contributions of women to the discipline of programming and billed it as such, I might have read it, finished it, and then praised it. Assuming of course it was well-written. But instead they tried to backdoor an agenda in there, reminding the reader continuously of the unfairness of being a women.

For anyone interested, I put do the book down at this paragraph:

“““
During the first half of 1964, two college-age White men, John McGeachie and Michael Busch, devoted hours to computer programming. So much time, in fact, that McGeachie was known as 225, short for the GE-225 mainframe computer for which he was responsible, and Busch was known as 30, short for the GE Datanet-30 computer that he programmed. They were students at Dartmouth, an elite, overwhelmingly White, Ivy League college that admitted only men as undergraduates, and they were coding a new computing network. In the early 1960s, McGeachie’s and Busch’s access to technology was extraordinary.
”””… (meer)

Short essays on code, good and bad, buggy and intentional, from the origins of code in weaving and music to the Volkswagen defeat device to the “like” button to the first police profiling algorithm (in 1968!) and more. Ethan Zuckerman, who coded the first pop-up ad, writes: “Sometime around 1997, I wrote a line of JavaScript code that made the world a measurably worse place.” “Brand safety” was the motivation: “The pop-up specifically came about after an auto company complained about their ad appearing on a personal homepage about anal sex. My boss asked me to find a way to sell ads while ensuring brand managers wouldn’t send us screen shots of their precious brands juxtaposed with offensive content. My slapdash solution? Put the ad in a different window than the content. Presto! Plausible deniability!”

Joi Lisi Rankin is one author exploring the ways race and gender affected code: “Among the high schools connected to the Dartmouth network as part of the [1960s] NSF Secondary Schools Project, the coed public schools—all predominantly White—had only 40 hours of network time each week. By contrast, the private schools—which were all male, wealthy, and almost exclusively White—had 72 hours of network time each week.” And access was only for students in math/science classes, from which girls were often excluded. BASIC, developed at Dartmouth to be taught in a standard math class, was therefore a way of transitioning computing from women’s work to work from which women were excluded. From Meredith Broussard: “When same-sex marriage was legalized in the United States, … [t]he database redesign process was informally called Y2gay.”… (meer)