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A review by drewmoody321
How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency by Akiko Busch
2.0
Akiko Busch is not a fan of social media. Nor facial recognition software. Nor AI. Nor the cloud. Nor IoT. It doesn't seem she's a fan of the internet at large. And I don't blame her. But I don't know why she has such a staunch stance against it. And after reading this book, I'm no closer to an answer.
I was so excited to read this one for a long time. It was marketed as a manual for retaining some semblance of anonymity in an increasingly transparent world. And the introduction of the book certainly made it seem like Busch was setting out to write that manual. Instead this book is a collection of musings - not even essays - about different examples of "being invisible." Like fish that use camouflage, or jets that jam radar frequencies, or legends of magical peoples in Icelandic mythology.
Each chapter finds Busch relentlessly providing anecdotes and half thoughts paragraph after paragraph. Rarely sticking with an example of "invisibility" for longer than five or six sentences.
She's a tremendous writer. And some of the things she writes are genuinely fascinating and I'd love to learn more about it. But this book is not what it seems to be. So if you're looking into reading it so that you can find inspiration to quit your Instagram habit, look elsewhere.
I was so excited to read this one for a long time. It was marketed as a manual for retaining some semblance of anonymity in an increasingly transparent world. And the introduction of the book certainly made it seem like Busch was setting out to write that manual. Instead this book is a collection of musings - not even essays - about different examples of "being invisible." Like fish that use camouflage, or jets that jam radar frequencies, or legends of magical peoples in Icelandic mythology.
Each chapter finds Busch relentlessly providing anecdotes and half thoughts paragraph after paragraph. Rarely sticking with an example of "invisibility" for longer than five or six sentences.
She's a tremendous writer. And some of the things she writes are genuinely fascinating and I'd love to learn more about it. But this book is not what it seems to be. So if you're looking into reading it so that you can find inspiration to quit your Instagram habit, look elsewhere.