The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone, illustrated by Josh Neufeld

  Years ago, I was teaching a Grade 10 English course and had some students reading The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone, which was adapted into its graphic novel form by Josh Neufeld. Parts of it stuck with me for a long time. I remembered it as being an illuminating exploration of media and I was hoping to use it, at least in part, for my media studies course. I remembered the book as talking about the funding structure for media and how that impacts the kinds of messages we get to see (think: Noam Chomsky). 

There is some of that, but it isn’t exactly how I remembered. Essentially, The Influencing Machine is a history of journalism. Gladstone hops between different time periods and watershed moments in reporting and discusses the impact of the media in relation to peoples’ everyday experiences. She quotes from a range of primary sources, noting the reactions that people had to news when it became widely available in print—and then widely available on television—and then widely available on the internet. Perhaps it’s because Gladstone is a journalist that she’s able to tell it all as a story. She draws some clear parallels between different historical points in time, the most notable of which (for me) being the way journalism shifted during the Vietnam War and beyond.

There’s a lot to talk about in terms of media evolution: the changing relationship between journalists and the military, the way polls sway us or not (posting this on election day feels serendipitous…), the way that we have come to trust and distrust information. The vignettes Gladstone choose are effectively representative and the balance between her own narratorial voice and the accounts of others is nicely achieved to reflect the times and the commentary on the times. If there’s a downside to Gladstone’s historico-anthropological approach, it is that it is doomed to the marching on of time: even since the book’s publication in 2011, we have seen immense changes to journalism and reportage. While Gladstone references Stephen Colbert’s idea of “truthiness”, the book isn’t so current as to address “fake news” or living in a post-truth AI-content-generated world.

In a book like this (namely: a long-form essay turned into a graphic novel), it runs the risk of being bland, but Josh Neufeld’s illustrations add a liveliness and expressiveness to the work as a whole. The depictions of Gladstone herself are often amusingly cartoonish, transplanting her into different historical eras complete with period-appropriate garb. For a book that is intent on telling the “truth” (while “objectivity” is problematized), Neufeld does not shy away from some creative embellishment. The pages have a liveliness to them that captures the spirit of the time, if not the letter of the time (although there are specific speeches and letters that have been illustrated here).

Gladstone’s book gives us a lot of food for thought, especially as we progress into a world increasingly unchecked for factuality and manipulated into sensationalized stories. Granted, these tactics are nothing new—ever since the conception of news, there has been mis– and dis–information, but the book needs an update, a revised text that explores how the media industry is being influenced by big tech’s privatization of information and its subsequent manipulation over us. The debate of privately / publicly funded news is given an engaging voice with uncertain answers here—and it’s time to take action. Like the book itself, I’ll end this review with a reminder: we get the media we deserve. It’s time to claim it.

Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City by Tanya Talaga

  I often think about the role of statistics in inciting people to feel sympathy and take action. The anonymity of numbers, unfortunately, disguises the profoundly horror of some aspects of human existence. It often feels like hundreds or thousands of people die and are absorbed into their status as a statistic. If we know someone, though, how can we quantify the loss of them? Such sorrow is impossible to fathom.

I also think about a line from the poem “Dreamwood” by Adrienne Rich that reads, in part, “she would recognize that poetry / isn’t revolution but a way of knowing / why it must come.” I wonder about that, too. Do words actually incite change? It feels increasingly unlikely as we see unquantifiable amounts of ink spilled to fight against politicians that daily make the world a worse place and seem undeterred by the looming ridicule on their epitaphs.

Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers is the same kind of knowing: a humanizing knowing. For years, this book was required reading for teenagers and teachers studying Indigenous issues—with good reason. It’s informative with respect to issues that came up in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, including the horrors of residential schools, the dismantling of families through biased adoption practices, the failures of law enforcement and legal proceedings, and so forth. The book is specifically focused, though, on telling the stories of real people. Talaga offers a thorough account of the tragic deaths of Indigenous students in Thunder Bay. The victims, though, are actually humanized in a way rare to nonfiction. Beyond just telling us their names, means of death, culprits responsible, and so forth, we get a sense of their interests, their friendships, their passions.

In turn, Seven Fallen Feathers is the kind of book that inspires us to see things differently, to see abstract issues as tangible. It’s the kind of book that inspires a revolution in thinking and proves instructive in empathy. There are moments of such profound devastation that the idea of blindly accepting injustices becomes beyond ludicrous. The deaths of the children feel personal, and Talaga’s account of the suicide attempts of an adult who cared for these students and lost everything else wring the heart at every level.

Talaga’s gifts as a writer carry the stories to a new level of resonance. She is journalistic in nature, but offers a narrative spin. Seven Fallen Feathers reads almost novelistically. The pacing of the events feels carefully crafted around story beats and the characterization of real people is wrought in fine detail. The language of the book is given such care and it reads beautifully. It has the engaging tone of a true crime podcast, but deals with systemic issues and maintains a deep focus on the people most deeply affected.

The book is compelling in every regard. It shows compassion for the community, offers a critical eye to systems that reinforce injustice, and provides the young people who lost their lives with the dignity and respect that they deserve. From a narrative standpoint, the book works. From a nonfiction informative standpoint, the book works. As a political act, the book works.

Now let’s do the work. Happy reading.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

  The irony of posting this online and advertising it via Facebook is already a significant problem—and I’m concerned that I’m succumbing to the “inevitabilism” of simply accepting exploitation at the hands of corporations, recognizing that they’ll use my information as they see fit. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, she explores how corporate interests have established a system to exploit us for information. There’s the phrase that “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product,” but Zuboff suggests that surveillance capitalism goes even further: not only does it render us and our information products, but it uses our information to modify our behaviours and enact corporate interests on the world.

The three guiding questions of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism are: who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides? Those three questions are a mantra that repeats throughout the book. In every situation, we need to think about what information is out there, who decides how that information is collected and distributed, and who decides who decides to entrust with our data. It’s surveillance, data-driven capitalism all the way to the top and Zuboff outlines the different layers of how we are consistently categorized.

In the book, there is a broad overview of data surveillance and, I’d say, it reads as a little repetitive. The big picture is not exactly revolutionary: we all know that we’re being spied on constantly. What I would like to hear more about is how to resist. What are the precedents we have to look to for how to prevent exploitation by corporations and resist their manipulation.

Where The Age of Surveillance Capitalism shines is in the examination of specific egregious actions by corporations. If you ever needed a reason to hate Google, one of the most resonant anecdotes from the book is about Google Earth. When Google Earth and Street View were taking off, there were a number of controversies, including them being blamed for aiding in a deadly terrorist attack in Mumbai. The Google representative “cleverly equated any resistance to Google’s incursions with the anti-freedom of expression interests of authoritarian governments and their closed information societies.” Resistance, though, persisted. The citizens of Broughton, a small village in England, blocked a street view car that tried to breach the village perimeter. It was an “unwelcome intrusion. Privacy International then submitted a complaint to the U.K. authority, “citing more than 200 reports from people who were identifiable on street view images and demanded that the service be suspended.” The Google rep defended the use of Google’s street view and said that their information was good for the economy and good for people as individuals. He voiced the classic defence that “it’s about giving people about powerful information so that they can make better choices.” 

Zuboff offers the counterpoint: “the firm wants to enable people to make better choices, but not if those choices impede Google’s own imperatives.” She continues, “Google’s ideal society is a population of distant users, not a citizenry. It idealizes people who are informed, but only in the ways that the corporation chooses. It means for us to be docile, harmonious, and, above all, grateful.” It’s a poignant phrase that returns to the questions: who knows? who decides? who decides who decides? Essentially, it’s all about what information corporations want us to have—and we see that all across politics. Which platforms offer which information? How do TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, and so on, decide what to show you? It’s the classic problem of the subaltern speaking: can we ever actually hear the voice of others? There always seems to be a barrier there.

Zuboff continues on to discuss the idea of Google’s street view as a camouflaged and covert datasweep. The street view cars were secretly collecting personal data from private WiFi networks. Despite Google denying the charges, “insisting that it was gathering only publicly broadcast WiFi network names and the identifying addresses of WiFi routers, not not personal information sent over the network.” However, an independent analysis by German security experts “proved decisively that streetview’s cars were extracting unencrypted personal information from homes” They intercepted and stored payload data: personal information, entire e-mails, URLs, passwords, names, telephone numbers, credit information, chat transcripts, records of online dating, pornography, browsing information, medical data, photos, videos, and audio files. The information could all be stitched together for “an identifiable profile of a person.”

We’ve all had the experience of having a personal conversation and then all of a sudden you start getting ads on your phone for the very thing you were talking about. It’s so difficult to parse how much of those ads are the result of companies spying on us vs. how much of what we talk about is already influenced by the profiles companies have on us. The cycle is such a challenge to unencrypt, as it were.

Overall, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a reasonably good overview of the problem of data collection on consumers. While it’s a bit too broad to feel impactful, the specific moments are worth examining. I’d like to learn more about how to resist, especially because surveillance capitalism is such a rapidly accelerating beast to contend with.

After opening this you’ll probably get all kinds of new ads about books to buy and whatever. You’re welcome.

Happy reading; unhappy Googling!