I recently joined an online international community that I stumbled across. It’s hosted by a guy who has said he started it to keep in touch with old friends, of which I am not one. He offers a paid membership, the cost of which went up 10x the day before I discovered all this. Price is one reason I didn’t join – the other reason is that I, honestly, don’t feel like I could keep up with these people in the paid community, which is all about activating a creative project.

Because I am so well-read and so good at connecting dots across dispersed and seemingly disconnected things, I’d fallen into the bad habit of confusing that with intelligence. Meeting with these people for an hour each week has disabused me of that notion.

But we all need a hobby where we can be truly bad at something. For a decade, for me, that was yoga. Since my bad knee has gotten so bad, yoga is out. So instead, I dial into this Zoom call and try really hard to listen and ask questions and restrain my natural tendency to speak.

On the first call, I made the mistake of mentioning a book I had just finished reading that I had really enjoyed which had opened up a whole scholarly topic I hadn’t been interested in previously – only to be schooled by a guy who reads 1500+words/minute and shared, before the call ended, an academic paper refuting the main premise of the book, written in language so technical that I couldn’t even process the abstract.

On another call, I tentatively mentioned one of the books I’m writing. Only to discover that one of the other women is working on a novel, a real novel, and then witnessing a technical discussion about writing between that author and another participant that went so far over my head that I regretted putting pen to paper. Ever.

I introduce the topic of this group I have stumbled into, as a preface to stating that the topic of this book is not something that I read much about.

Our library includes a few other books about the CIA or similar topics: Legacy of Ashes (Tim Weiner’s history of the CIA) which I don’t think I read – I’m pretty sure that my husband who, for a while, had a bad habit of watching Book TV and buying – and reading! – books discovered there, bought and read. Jane Meyer’s The Dark Side, which I bought because my husband saw it on Book TV and thought I would like it because, you know, aliens. Ghost Wars (another of my husband’s purchases). Lee and Shlain’s Acid Dreams (my purchase), in which the CIA’s MKULTRA program plays a guest-starring role. And a whole bunch of books about conspiracy theories (mine, mostly purchased when reading about conspiracy theories was still fun).

All to say, I don’t enough to review this book on its technical merits.

Here is what I will say: It’s a very easy book to read and understand, even for someone as apparently ignorant as I am. The author does a good job laying out the technical and policy challenges and how things work, in everyday language, and illustrating them with stories everyone (or at least everyone my age) can remember hearing in the news.

However.

This book was published in 2022 and I can’t help thinking that, while the history holds up, the “current event” sections feel a little… outdated…

For example, Twitter is still Twitter in this book. When she was writing it, we were going through what seemed like a short episode of madness in an otherwise reasonably functioning democracy with constitutional checks and balances. National security had not been compromised by handing the keys to government data, including social security numbers, tax and health records of every single American citizen over to a private company run by an unregulated anti-democracy pro-apartheid foreign kazillionaire with a dysfunctional ketamine habit, and vast team of quickly recruited juvenile minions with inexperienced judgement about security and a mandate to use AI to identify and excise government programs and employees who have anything to do with diversity, equal rights, ecology, the environment, or anything that could possibly appeal to the 51% of people who did not vote for their commander in chief. The U.S. was not yet experiencing a serious brain drain of policy makers and scientists who had become disillusioned by how quickly the work they had devoted their lives to had been cavalierly dismantled and – in many cases – destroyed. Before loyal members of the intelligence community were cast out, the attorneys and watchdogs responsible for holding law enforcement and intelligence agencies accountable pushed out and replaced by those who added the words “for us” to each component of the constitution: “the freedom of speech for us – but not for you” and so on. And we had not yet alienated our foreign allies, holders of our national debt, and individual citizens of countries we had been at war with who sacrificed everything they had to back the U.S. in those wars in exchange for a promise that we have now proved meant nothing.

Events that certainly created financial and personal hardship and, one assumes, resentment. All recipes for treason.

Although “algorithms” is in the title, and she does address them in the book, the author could not foresee the deliberate skewing of algorithms by every social media platform to promote the perspectives of their progenitors – or that the CEOs would line up to present gifts and complement the emperor on his new clothes, without exception, and with impunity.

The book is almost quaint in its pre-AI way. She does discuss AI – just doesn’t see the LLM freight train that has exponentially exploded the types of problems she does discuss in the book. The security risks of all those non-engineers building their own apps and workflows alone is tremendous – to say nothing of the misinformation problem and the deliberate coding to promote addiction to agents that do not have the best interests of anyone but their technical overlords in mind. (See Chat-GPT writing school shooting plans for teens.) The section on the problems with congressional oversight seems… understated.

To be fair, when the book was published, it would have been comprehensive and current in its coverage. I don’t fault the author. It’s not her fault the world went insane immediately following publication. And I don’t regret reading it – although I wish I had read it when I bought it in 2022 but my life was particularly challenging that year and it was all I could to read James’ Popular Crime over and over and over again.

Perhaps she could update the “current” sections of this book now.

But I suspect, at this rate of change, any updates would be immediately obsolete yet again.