I read Adam Hochschild’s book King Leopold’s Ghost back in January of 2013. In hindsight, I’d have to say now it’s one of the most influential books I’ve read in my life, which I think is saying something. It is an incredible, detailed, horrifying work of historical writing, telling the story of how Belgium’s King Leopold destroyed the region of Africa that is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, exploiting its people and resources for personal gain while setting the stage for what has been sixty-plus years of bloody civil wars. It’s the most damning work I’ve read on colonialism. It provides a new and somehow even more excoriating view of western racism towards Africans. It changed how I think about the world.
For some reason, I had never sought out Hochschild’s other books until last year, when my daughter had to read his To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. His approach here is to provide a history of World War I through a modest number of individual Britons, many of whom were connected by family, marriage/liaison, class, or cause, while telling the larger story of this bloody, pointless war through brief descriptions of military maneuvers and deadly battles. The result is a book that is quite readable despite the grim subject matter and that also sheds light on a number of historical figures, some famous and some who probably should be, while also delving into the war’s effects on women’s suffrage, the labor movement, and the Russian Revolution.
The choice to focus on British subjects allows Hochschild, who is American, to make many of the stories far more personal. Many of the people he follows, including Rudyard Kipling, end up losing a son on the battlefields, yet only in some cases does it change their perception of the war – Kipling was an ardent hawk whose racism on the page translated well into similar sentiments against the Germans. The women of the Pankhurst family were all ardent suffragettes, but they split when the war began, in part due to a disagreement over whether becoming war supporters might win them more support in Parliament, but primarily due to a fundamental disagreement over human rights. The cast also includes military leaders John French and Douglas Haig, Prime Minister Lloyd George, pacifist Charlotte Despard, Labour Party founder Keir Hardie, and philosopher Bertrand Russell, most of whose lives would intersect in myriad ways through their positions on the war, both official and unofficial.
Hochschild’s decision to follow all of these people also spares us some of the grisliest aspects of the war, although he doesn’t eschew them entirely, particularly in describing trench warfare and the various new ways in which it allowed soldiers to die. That makes for a book that’s just far more readable, and also means that when someone connected to one of his main characters does die, it sits larger on the page – one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic, just in literary form.
In an ironic contrast to the callous way in which its various leaders and commanders sent millions of young men to their deaths or to life-altering wounds, World War I also brought out the largest antiwar effort we had seen, itself an outgrowth of a movement that began during the Boer War against Dutch colonizers in what is now South Africa. (In that war, white fought white, and the losers, as always, were the natives.) Hochschild steps back to tell that war’s history, both how it began and how antiwar sentiment crystallized and grew before and during its progression, tying it into the voices who spoke out against war in Europe even before it began, and to the conscientious objectors who rose in number during World War I and often faced harsh prison terms or even forced conscription.
What To End All Wars is not, and does not try to be, is a comprehensive history of the war. A few battles get the full treatment, while others receive little to no mention. Hochschild’s digressions on the Boer War, the pacifist movement, the fall of the Tsar and the Russian Revolution, British politics, and more mean that the look at the Great War itself is selective, albeit not superficial. He also doesn’t dedicate much time to exploring the causes of the war, a welcome decision given how much literature there is on that subject (I feel like that is all I ever learned about WWI in school, even if the whole topic remains open to debate). This is very much a story of one country’s role in the war viewed through maybe eight to ten people, with tendrils reaching out to cover some related topics – but only as they connect back to Britain.
Instead, we get some small character studies, several of them around people who aren’t well remembered (at least not in the U.S.) but have extremely interesting back stories. I was less caught up in the stories of the various military men, including French and Haig, who were terrible people happy to condemn thousands of soldiers to certain death and somehow even worse than that at military strategy; the civilians Hochschild discusses are all more compelling and three-dimensional on the page. The royalist Viscountess Violet Cecil saw the brutality of the Boer War, then lost her only son, George, in the first year of the Great War, yet remained a vocal hawk until its end, only to become an advocate of appeasement when she became the editor of her family’s conservative periodical The National Review (unrelated to the American publication). Emmeline Pankhurst cut off two of her own daughters over their political disagreements, as she became a jingoistic supporter of Britain’s war efforts, while daughters Sylvia and Adela remained true to their cause and became socialists and labor agitators, although Adela eventually flipped and became a right-wing nationalist during World War II. Charlotte Despard was also a suffragist and went to prison four times for her cause, later also fighting for Irish independence, yet also spent a large part of her time advocating for the poor and even lived in a small flat above one of her ‘shops’ to provide services for poor residents of one disadvantaged area of London. Bertrand Russell, quite a famous figure for his non-fiction writings in philosophy and math, is more human on the pages here too, with only mentions of his written opposition to the war but not his other work.
To End All Wars didn’t radicalize me the way that King Leopold’s Ghost did, but it is also an infuriating work in many ways because there is such broad, blind disregard for the value of human life, and in this case it comes from so many people. It’s a deeply humanist work at its core, even with all its depictions of callousness and suffering, and also a highly accessible work with a strong narrative that had me hooked despite my previously low degree of interest in its subject.
Next up: Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley.
Filterworld.
In his new book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, journalist Kyle Chayka details the myriad ways in which we are thrust towards homogeneity in music, television, movies, books, and even architecture and travel because, in his view, of the tyranny of the algorithm. The book is more of a polemic than a work of research, filled with personal anecdotes and quotes from philosophers as well as observers of culture, and while Chayka is somewhat correct in that a small number of companies are now determining what people watch, listen to, and read, that’s always been true – it’s just happening now by algorithm when technology was supposed to democratize access to culture.
Chayka’s premise is sound on its surface: Major tech companies now depend on maintaining your attention to hold or increase revenues, and they do that via algorithm. Netflix’s algorithm keeps recommending movies and shows it believes you’ll watch – not that you will like, but that you will watch, or at least not turn off – thus keeping you as a customer. Spotify’s auto-generated playlists largely serve you artists and songs that are similar to ones you’ve already liked, or at least have already listened to, as I’ve learned recently because I listened to one song by the rapper Werdperfect that a friend sent me and now Spotify puts Werdperfect on every god damned playlist it makes for me. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, and their ilk all use algorithms to show you what will keep you engaged, not what you asked to see via your following list. Amazon’s recommendations are more straightforward, giving you products its algorithm thinks you’ll buy based on other things you’ve bought.
Chayka goes one further, though, arguing that algorithmic tyranny extends into meatspace, using it to explain the ubiquity of Brooklyn-style coffee shops, with sparse décor, subway tiles, exposed wood, and industrial lighting. He uses it to explain homogeneity in Airbnb listings, arguing that property owners must determine what the algorithm wants and optimize their spaces to maximize their earnings. He is ultimately arguing that we will all look the same, sound the same, wear the same clothes, live in the same spaces, drink the same expensive lattes, and so on, because of the algorithms.
To this I say: No shit. It’s called capitalism, and the algorithm itself is not the disease, but a symptom.
Businesses exist to make money, and in a competitive marketplace, that’s generally a good thing – it drives innovation and forces individual companies to respond to customer demand or lose market share to competitors. These market forces led to the advent of mass production over a century ago, a process that depended on relatively uniform tastes across a broad spectrum of consumers, because mass-producing anything economically depends on that uniformity. You can’t mass-produce custom clothes, by definition. Companies that have invested heavily in capital to mass produce their widgets will then work to further expand their customer base by encouraging homogeneity in tastes – thus the push for certain fashions to be “in” this year (as they were twenty years prior), or the marketing put behind specific books or songs or movies to try to gain mass adoption. Coffee shops adopt similar looks because customers like that familiarity, for the same reason that McDonald’s became a global giant – you walk into any McDonald’s in the world and you by and large know what to expect, from how it looks to what’s on the menu. This isn’t new. In fact, the idea of the algorithm isn’t even new; it is the technology that is new, as companies can implement their algorithms at a speed and scale that was unthinkable two decades earlier.
Furthermore, we are living in a time of limited competition, closer to what our forefathers faced in the trust era than what our parents faced in the 1980s. There is no comparably-sized competitor to Amazon. Spotify dominates music streaming. Each social media entity I listed earlier has no direct competition; they compete with each other, but each serves a different need or desire from consumers. The decline of U.S. antitrust enforcement since the Reagan era has exacerbated the problem. Fewer producers will indeed produce less variety in products.
However, the same technology that Chayka decries throughout Filterworld has flattened more than culture – it has flattened the hierarchy that led to homogeneity in culture from the 1950s through the 1990s. Music was forced, kicking and screaming, to give up its bundling practice, where you could purchase only a few individual songs but otherwise had to purchase entire albums to hear specific titles, by Napster and other file-sharing software products. Now, through streaming services, not only can any artist bypass the traditional record-label gatekeepers, but would-be “curators” can find, identify, and recommend these artists and their songs, the way that only DJs at truly independent radio stations could do in earlier eras. (And yes, I hope that I am one of those curators. My monthly playlists are the product of endless exploration on my own, with a little help from the Spotify algorithm on the Release Radar playlists, but mostly just me messing around and looking for new music.) Goodreads is a hot mess, owned by Amazon and boosting the Colleen Hoovers of the world, but it’s also really easy to find people who read a lot of books and can recommend the ones they like. (Cough.) Movies, food, travel, television, and so on are all now easier to consume, and if you are overwhelmed by the number and variety of choices, it’s easier to find people who can guide you through it. I try to be that type of guide for you when it comes to music and books and board games, and to some extent to restaurants. When it comes to television, I read Alan Sepinwall. When it comes to movies, I listen to Will Leitch & Tim Grierson, and I read Christy Lemire, and I bother Chris Crawford. I also just talk to my friends and see what they like. I have book friends, movie friends, game friends, coffee friends, rum friends, and so on. The algorithms, and the companies that deploy them, don’t decide for me because I made the very easy choice to decide for myself.
So I didn’t really buy Chayka’s conclusions in Filterworld, even though I thought the premise was sound and deserved this sort of exploration. I also found the writing in the book to be dull, unfortunately, with the sort of dry quality of academic writing without the sort of rigor that you might see in a research paper. I could have lived with that if he’d sold me better on his arguments, but he gives too little attention to points that might truly matter, such as privacy regulations in the E.U. and the lack thereof in the U.S., and too much weight to algorithms that will only affect your life if you let them.
Next up: Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop.