Reviews and Comments

this book sure describes some landscapes, heck

So far (six pages) this is much better than the previous Enheduanna book

This was so interesting! Definitely gonna reread some chapters

apparently this is an unhinged, completely-fabricated-from-whole-cloth travel guide to taiwan from 1704?? I would like to read it. Psalmanazar even made up an entire language

this was charming! I was charmed

The subject matter of this book is fascinating but I found the book itself disorganized and not terribly well written, and the author seems to be projecting intensely onto Enheduanna from scant evidence.

While I don't know anything about Sumer, I found a lot of her scholarship kinda fishy, and frankly it had a bit of TERF-y smell (although that might just be a second-wave-feminist smell that has developed a bad association for me).

I have a nagging initial feeling that this is Just Not For Me but it's my only book on this flight so I'll give it a shot regardless

so far I want to excerpt every single sentence because each one is incredible

I had to give this back to the library with just a bit left and I am very interested to see how it ends when I get a copy back. Not in an entirely positive way, though -- this book is super disturbing and there has to be a lot of payoff for that to be worth it to me

I'm not sure if I'm fully on board with Daub's theory that because the platform supersedes the content in value and merit to companies, workers who don't directly work on the product, like kitchen staff and book scanners, are ignored as "tech workers."

I feel like this under-weights class bias and the gap between jobs viewed "skilled" and "unskilled" labor.

Plus, it seems like this paradigm would place advertising and marketing staff outside the category viewed as tech workers, since they work on content for the platform or otherwise not directly on the platform, which isn't consistent with my experience

I'm barely through the introduction and I'm already yelling YES, THANK YOU at this dang book

This book had maybe 1 page of content and the rest was just pop social science and hand-wavey examples that don't hold up well under examination.

For a book that is all about examining how systems shape end users' behavior, it shows a stark inability to consider how systems shape companies' behavior, and the nod to ethics boils down to asking individuals to just try and be ethical, through willpower and gut feeling.

this book is genuinely creepy, collins does such a good job of giving me just enough information to be unsettled but not enough to know the score