We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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Personally, I prefer reviews that get right to the point: is the book good and should I buy it? I want to know what’s good and what’s not. The point of a review, in my opinion, is to tell the reader whether a book is worth $7.99 or $13.99 or $24.95 or however much a book is.
That said, I like reading the occasional “critical” review (like what Larry of at OF Blog of the Fallen) does, but that generally doesn’t influence my decision on a book. I like those for the literary depth, because it helps me in my academic work (since I’m a literature student). I can develop better reading skills for writing papers, etc. that way.
The reviews I write are the kind of reviews I like to read, though. Straight to the point. But I have no problem with both forms existing together and it’s sort of irritating that people get in a tiffy over the fact that some people do simple reviews and other people do critical reviews. Who cares? They both serve a vital purpose and you can’t expect every person who wants to read a review to like one single form. There are people like me who don’t want to spend hours on the net reading an article just to find out if a book is worth their money. And then there are some who just don’t have the mental patience for simplistic reviews, because they feel that they don’t get a good taste of the book.
So yeah, that’s what I have to say.