Roger McNameeZucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe

Abstract

Yuri Izdryk Smokes Trans. Roman Ivashkiv & Erin Moure. Sandpoint, Idaho. Lost Horse Press. 2019. 103 pages. This useful translation of poems, culled from six books by renowned Ukrainian author Yuri Izdryk, makes the most of the facing-page translation format by allowing alphabets to drift across the center line, playfully mixing Cyrillic and Latin scripts in a way that both reduces and reinforces the distance between Ukrainian and English and thus between the poet and the anglophone reader. Such playfulness is appropriate in a translation of a poet so given to wordplay and pop culture allusions. While Roman Ivashkiv and Erin Moure don’t always reproduce the tight rhyming that connects Izdryk both to traditional poetry and to hip-hop culture in a way that may remind American readers of Michael Robbins, they do convey the poet’s tendency to run amok through etymology in lines like “a pandemic of anxiety and panic as panacea ” from the poem “Panpipe.” A deep restlessness as well as an intense privacy underlie the poet’s wordplay, both manifested in a refusal to let language settle into any clear and straightforward sense. Izdryk seems to be constantly seeking something or someone and constantly avoiding being found himself. In “Zoom,” the speaker says, “this house sits above thermal waters / where green is the grass on the rocks forever / there are no roads and no trails reach it,” one of many moments in which the poet situates the voice of the poem in an unreachable house or room, as if he is speaking to us but also reminding us that we cannot speak back. Interestingly, this dynamic is reversed as in a mirror when the poet often speaks to a God he is more than half certain is his own invention. In “Panpipe,” he writes, “reveal yourself speak your name show where you are / why can’t you hang loose about your creation.” In a poem called “Prayer,” it is not entirely clear, despite the poem’s title, if he is speaking to God or to a lover when he says, “when the world turns its back / and distances and walls rise between us / talk to me,” but as that last line gets repeated throughout the poem, the reader begins to hear a kind of desperation in the plea. Through slippery language and shifting imagery, Izdryk avoids being pinned down, but rather than coming off as distant and cold, this elusiveness makes the poetry seem all the more human, all the more relatable in its anxieties. Benjamin Myers Oklahoma Baptist University Roger McNamee Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe New York. Penguin. 2019. 336 pages. Why do we permit companies like Facebook and Google to gather behavioral data on minors? Why do we allow Google to scan our emails, including emails sent to us from people that are not linked to Google? And why do we let the large media companies of the twenty-first century get away with tailoring our online experience around the triggering and amplification of addictive patterns and largely negative emotional responses, which maximize our time spent on their platforms ? It has taken too long for questions regarding the societal impact of social-media platform business models to be voiced and then heard. One voice currently amplifying the much-needed criticism is that of Roger McNamee. McNamee had been a Silicon Valley tech investor for almost three decades and a tech optimist for even longer when he was asked to advise a twenty-two-year-old Mark Zuckerberg on a billion-dollar bid for his then-two-year-old company, Facebook. Over the three years that ensued, Zuckerberg chose to follow McNamee’s advice on several questions. Among other things, this resulted in Zuckerberg keeping control of his company as well as hiring Sheryl Sandberg as COO, which ended McNamee’s own advisory role with the young CEO. The role that McNamee played in the genesis of today’s Facebook imbued him with a sense of obligation to lay open and speak out against the effects of the business model the company adopted after Sandberg joined its ranks. The same model also drives Instagram and WhatsApp (both owned by Facebook) as well...