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For ALL the People: Redeeming the Broken Promises of Modern Media and Reclaiming Our Civic Life
A leader in digital communication and grassroots political campaigns explains how the internet and modern media have undermined America and how we can reclaim our voices for the good of civic life. The creators of the internet promised us better experiences, more choices, and deeper relationships. Built on a diversity of voices, our online freedom was supposed to spark a democratic transformation. But our platforms don’t work for us—we’re the inventory and our outrage fuels a tech revolution optimized for profit, not civic life. As one of the top digital strategists for Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns, Michael Slaby saw the beginning of a new kind of national division. What he witnessed would spawn the Tea Party movement, upset the 2016 election, and accelerate the polarization of American civic life. Slaby presents the four core areas which can be reclaimed to work better for all of platforms, government institutions, corporations, and even the users ourselves. Optimistic, future-focused, and deeply passionate, For ALL the People breaks down how we got here, and how we, the users, can work toward a better democracy through tech.
- GenresNonfictionPolitics
206 pages, Paperback
Published February 23, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 7, 2021
Good reading for anyone interested in honest news and media information.
July 17, 2021
This book was interesting, and the premise is one of the tighter syntheses on many issues that surround our current political/media landscape I’ve read in recent memory. The author also makes an attempt to introduce some ‘precision’/rigor in the way we think/speak about these issues, namely contextualizing political discourse and media consumption within the structure of graphs (nodes and edges, not dots and axes). However, despite the text possessing two of these unique features, some readers may find nothing new here, and the attempted aforementioned fusion between formalism and concept to be much too shallow to be of material interests from a practical standpoint. Therefore, the best readership for this text is likely to be individuals coming from the broader policy arena or people who have not been much exposed to the political discourse in the United States for the past few years and need a first-book to anchor their further readings in this genre.
Slaby’s premise is simple, Web 2.0 and other social media platforms function to cleave apart different segments of the US population by minimizing meaningful social discourse, and maximizing shallow commentary/content that are designed to reinforce individual political proclivities/self-biases that increases division. This process is the resultant effect of a naive application of optimization to maximize conversion metrics (e.g. # of clicks per time-delta, conversion within a funnel etc.) on web 2.0 and social platforms. This in turn increases the ‘mind-share’ these platforms have gained vis-a-vis traditional media (TV/magazines/books/talking-to-your-neighbor etc.), which lastly in turn leads to Politicians, and their political campaigns, who detect these partisan signals, and move ever further to previously fringe positions within the traditional political spectrums to capture greater voter share. On and on this process goes, in an ever increasing cybernetic loop, where the ‘man in the machine’ (the politician) has not exercised their agency to stop or mitigate these pathologies, but have defaulted to “going with the flow” which again amplifies the distortion.
Whether the above process actually reflects what is happening in reality is a matter of data, which is sparse in a field that has traditionally been dominated by classical sampling techniques and cumbersome questionnaires that have been gamed/compromised over the years, or are hinged on a sample-window that has become more biased over the decades (the subset of individuals who have landlines say). Whatever the truth of the matter, the narrative outlined by the author has been written/discussed extensively before the publication of this book. Specifically, I’ve seen this narrative outlined by the vulgar/general/common commentary that have emerged from the broad spectrum of the ‘new left’ (which range from a social-democatic cohort to the ‘dirt-bag left’), after the 2016 presidential election. The difference between Slaby’s narrative and these other commentators is that he seeks to find some kind of technical ‘fix’/reform for this issue at least in part, within the web-structure of the internet and those platforms specifically. Further, Slaby aims to preserve the civil society that currently exists, albeit in an ameliorated state, which again is achieved via a technocratic fix. Other commentators, however, view these pathologies as endemic in the system and question more fundamental structures found within the current civil society, specifically the market-oriented structure that itself serves as a platform to it.
Still, I think all individuals throughout that spectrum (or even those within much of the right) would agree with the general narrative outlined in Slaby’s synthesis (they would clearly lay blame to different elements/agents) so it should serve a broader audience. The other component which makes this text more unique within the set of books in this genre is that it does make use of the parlance of graphs, either because Slaby views it as the correct characterization of both the political discourse and social/news interchange, or because this is the language that has been appropriated broadly in many of the Web 2.0 companies, and therefore is ‘native’ to the platforms in question. However, the use of these concepts never escapes anything beyond ‘definitional’ level use, and in this sense, the book is nothing special. For many decades I’ve read non-technical non-fiction that have made use of this contextual framework, ranging from science nonfiction to business. In fact, well over a decade ago I was given a random book in a seminar titled “Relationship Economics” that sought to contextualize business-to-business relationship within the structure of Gravonetter’s social network theory. There are literally a few dozen other books (mostly obscure) that again do similar things with respect to using this as their paradigm for analysis. Nothing new in this unfortunately.
Slaby does begin to provide some interesting technical suggestions with respect to concrete web information standardization and alterations to existing protocols like RSS that could help alleviate the pathologies he identifies in the first 4/5ths of the text, but this section is much too short. The book would be better served by significantly beefing up this part of the book, and maybe cutting down some of the ‘conceptual’ discussions in the other parts of the text. Overall, it would be an interesting introductory read on this topic in an already crowded field, though it is much more concise than many of those other books (scattered reference to comic book franchises and pop-culture notwithstanding), and thus would be a good summary for many people looking to understand these issues for the first time. Conditional recommendation for readers new to the subject matter.
Slaby’s premise is simple, Web 2.0 and other social media platforms function to cleave apart different segments of the US population by minimizing meaningful social discourse, and maximizing shallow commentary/content that are designed to reinforce individual political proclivities/self-biases that increases division. This process is the resultant effect of a naive application of optimization to maximize conversion metrics (e.g. # of clicks per time-delta, conversion within a funnel etc.) on web 2.0 and social platforms. This in turn increases the ‘mind-share’ these platforms have gained vis-a-vis traditional media (TV/magazines/books/talking-to-your-neighbor etc.), which lastly in turn leads to Politicians, and their political campaigns, who detect these partisan signals, and move ever further to previously fringe positions within the traditional political spectrums to capture greater voter share. On and on this process goes, in an ever increasing cybernetic loop, where the ‘man in the machine’ (the politician) has not exercised their agency to stop or mitigate these pathologies, but have defaulted to “going with the flow” which again amplifies the distortion.
Whether the above process actually reflects what is happening in reality is a matter of data, which is sparse in a field that has traditionally been dominated by classical sampling techniques and cumbersome questionnaires that have been gamed/compromised over the years, or are hinged on a sample-window that has become more biased over the decades (the subset of individuals who have landlines say). Whatever the truth of the matter, the narrative outlined by the author has been written/discussed extensively before the publication of this book. Specifically, I’ve seen this narrative outlined by the vulgar/general/common commentary that have emerged from the broad spectrum of the ‘new left’ (which range from a social-democatic cohort to the ‘dirt-bag left’), after the 2016 presidential election. The difference between Slaby’s narrative and these other commentators is that he seeks to find some kind of technical ‘fix’/reform for this issue at least in part, within the web-structure of the internet and those platforms specifically. Further, Slaby aims to preserve the civil society that currently exists, albeit in an ameliorated state, which again is achieved via a technocratic fix. Other commentators, however, view these pathologies as endemic in the system and question more fundamental structures found within the current civil society, specifically the market-oriented structure that itself serves as a platform to it.
Still, I think all individuals throughout that spectrum (or even those within much of the right) would agree with the general narrative outlined in Slaby’s synthesis (they would clearly lay blame to different elements/agents) so it should serve a broader audience. The other component which makes this text more unique within the set of books in this genre is that it does make use of the parlance of graphs, either because Slaby views it as the correct characterization of both the political discourse and social/news interchange, or because this is the language that has been appropriated broadly in many of the Web 2.0 companies, and therefore is ‘native’ to the platforms in question. However, the use of these concepts never escapes anything beyond ‘definitional’ level use, and in this sense, the book is nothing special. For many decades I’ve read non-technical non-fiction that have made use of this contextual framework, ranging from science nonfiction to business. In fact, well over a decade ago I was given a random book in a seminar titled “Relationship Economics” that sought to contextualize business-to-business relationship within the structure of Gravonetter’s social network theory. There are literally a few dozen other books (mostly obscure) that again do similar things with respect to using this as their paradigm for analysis. Nothing new in this unfortunately.
Slaby does begin to provide some interesting technical suggestions with respect to concrete web information standardization and alterations to existing protocols like RSS that could help alleviate the pathologies he identifies in the first 4/5ths of the text, but this section is much too short. The book would be better served by significantly beefing up this part of the book, and maybe cutting down some of the ‘conceptual’ discussions in the other parts of the text. Overall, it would be an interesting introductory read on this topic in an already crowded field, though it is much more concise than many of those other books (scattered reference to comic book franchises and pop-culture notwithstanding), and thus would be a good summary for many people looking to understand these issues for the first time. Conditional recommendation for readers new to the subject matter.
April 23, 2021
***I won this book in a Goodreads Giveaway***
It's been a long time since I've panned a book as hard as I'm about to pan this one. Hope y'all are ready.
This book was a huge waste of my time and disappointment. The author, Michael Slaby, is without a doubt knowledgable about the topic and even politically aligned pretty close to me. Both of those things gave me optimism that I would find value in this book.
Unfortunately, what I didn't realize is that Slaby is an utterly atrocious writer who reiterates unnecessarily long sentences with repetition and utilizes the most affectatious words he can while attempting to illucidate his objectives. Ya see what that's an issue? I struggled to read more than a few paragraphs at a time of this book as his writing style was just that bad.
On top of that, he never really makes his point. By titling his book with words like "redeeming" and "reclaiming" I assumed he would discuss actionable things people can do. I guess he did that. Maybe? His suggestions are things like...make businesses care less about profits and totally re-write the Facebook algorithms. Ya know, really practical stuff. *eye rolls forever*
This book is a jumble with no clear audience. The author will reiterate a point over and over again (ex: "the graph") as if it's incredibly hard to understand...but then throw out phrases like "Overton window" and "B Corp" and "grok" as if they are commonly understood by everyone (I knew 2 out of 3, but had to Google Overton window). No no no. Bad writing is bad.
Don't read this book. But do think about your media consumption, bubbles, and politics. Those things are important.
It's been a long time since I've panned a book as hard as I'm about to pan this one. Hope y'all are ready.
This book was a huge waste of my time and disappointment. The author, Michael Slaby, is without a doubt knowledgable about the topic and even politically aligned pretty close to me. Both of those things gave me optimism that I would find value in this book.
Unfortunately, what I didn't realize is that Slaby is an utterly atrocious writer who reiterates unnecessarily long sentences with repetition and utilizes the most affectatious words he can while attempting to illucidate his objectives. Ya see what that's an issue? I struggled to read more than a few paragraphs at a time of this book as his writing style was just that bad.
On top of that, he never really makes his point. By titling his book with words like "redeeming" and "reclaiming" I assumed he would discuss actionable things people can do. I guess he did that. Maybe? His suggestions are things like...make businesses care less about profits and totally re-write the Facebook algorithms. Ya know, really practical stuff. *eye rolls forever*
This book is a jumble with no clear audience. The author will reiterate a point over and over again (ex: "the graph") as if it's incredibly hard to understand...but then throw out phrases like "Overton window" and "B Corp" and "grok" as if they are commonly understood by everyone (I knew 2 out of 3, but had to Google Overton window). No no no. Bad writing is bad.
Don't read this book. But do think about your media consumption, bubbles, and politics. Those things are important.
May 17, 2021
Read this book!
For All the People describes, with compelling clarity, the underlying structures and drivers of modern media which have led to today’s hyper-polarized American politics and society. Michael Slaby explains how and why we've gotten here and asserts a vision of what it could look like for our media systems to instead facilitate authentic discourse, connectivity, and community. Importantly, Slaby offers substantive recommendations – from policy change to individual action – to support progress toward that vision.
Slaby’s authority as a leader in media and politics, intellectual horsepower, and ability to relay complex realities in accessible terms have allowed him to meet 2021 America with what may be the most consequential message of the day, if our nation’s future is to be that of a thriving democracy.
For All the People describes, with compelling clarity, the underlying structures and drivers of modern media which have led to today’s hyper-polarized American politics and society. Michael Slaby explains how and why we've gotten here and asserts a vision of what it could look like for our media systems to instead facilitate authentic discourse, connectivity, and community. Importantly, Slaby offers substantive recommendations – from policy change to individual action – to support progress toward that vision.
Slaby’s authority as a leader in media and politics, intellectual horsepower, and ability to relay complex realities in accessible terms have allowed him to meet 2021 America with what may be the most consequential message of the day, if our nation’s future is to be that of a thriving democracy.
January 19, 2022
This book is really informative but it is dryer than any textbook I’ve ever read in my entire educational career. He uses terminology that seems intentionally complex when something simpler would be far easier. I think it’s also naive in its idea that our relationship with media can change. While outrage politics and journalism are a real detriment to society, too many thrive on it to want to change it. If we were living in a utopian society, where we could remake all media into something beneficial, this book would probably be a good guide, but in the real world, where media is driven by dollar signs, it won’t work. Unless the leaders actually want to change (which you know they don’t, why fix something that to their pocketbooks isn’t broken) anyone attempting to implement change is just shouting into the void.
March 23, 2021
This book is very relevant now with our country being in such bad place. I believe it is hard for the country to move forward with the amount of political rancor there is. He says in order to improve we need to redesign our media platforms, restore journalism (I say they need to tell the truth and not their agenda) government needs to change (and work for us) and technology needs to be revamped and work for us and not cause more problems.
October 12, 2023
Good ideas but quite redundant and could’ve been a third of the length. And despite the author’s ideas on how to accomplish greater transparency and truth with online news sources, it made me feel as though revamping the media ecosystem to one of greater responsibility and morality is nearly an impossible undertaking, which I find depressing.
April 15, 2023
The author has ample knowledge about how technology has broken all aspects of modern life and offers possible solutions to the problem. However, I was hoping for a more specific plan and guidance about what we can do to navigate the confusing, unfair system now, not just what future to work toward.
Want to Read
February 9, 2021Review coming soon, just won the book and added it to my library
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews