A COSMOPOLITAN LAWYER: JUST SOME READINGS I HAVE ENJOYED LATELY

First, this blog replaces my previous blog, thecosmoplitanlawyerblogspot.com . Second, unlike that earlier blog, the present one is primarily meant as a record of my readings. It is not meant to suggest that others will be or should be interested in what I read. And third, in a sense, it is a public diary of one who is an alien in his own American culture. A person who feels at home just about anywhere, except in his birthplace . . . America.

Friday, November 10, 2017

CAN WE SURVIVE BIG TECH?

Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech (New York: Penguin Press, 2017):

Bookstores play an indispensable role in our capitalist system. They are an employment program for failed graduate students; they show how low margins and bake-sale profits will not defeat the spirit of entrepreneurship. Anyone who has browsed the literary theory aisle or studied the analytics for Russian novels can surely see how the road to the economy's commanding heights begins with bookselling. Perhaps it took a visionary to understand the untapped profit potential of the book. And to be sure, only Jeff Bezos could see how the ancient technology of inkling words one\to deceased vegetation was the ideal vehicle for winning the Internet, a gambit for dislodging and then surpassing Walmart as the king retail.

Id. at 79.