This book caught my eye last summer when it came out, but I didn’t get around to reading it until it was given to me as a Christmas present. It ended up on a couple year-end “best of” lists, so I was surprised to find that… it’s not especially well written. I found there to be a lot of distracting editorial choices throughout the book, and I went through big parts of the book very confused about what the author was trying to say.

Now: it wasn’t all bad; not in the least. The author does offer some fascinating ideas. I’ve subscribed to her podcast, and the book has spurred some related reading. But maybe a book wasn’t the right form for this information? Or maybe it needed a re-write in order to really focus in on an argument? Throughout the book it seemed the the author was spending lots of time setting up different ideas, but then abandoning them and moving on before getting too deep, or even bringing home a point.

One thing that is well illustrated in the book is a point she posits in the first part of the book: “Group affiliations make up the scaffolding on which we build our lives.” Thinking about human behavior in terms of this idea has been illuminating, just in the past few weeks since picking up the book. The central premise of the book is that our language choices revolve around these group affiliations, and that, because of this, the language illustrates the shape of the groups. A cool idea, for sure.

In the final section, she spends time illustrating the ascendancy of social media cult followings, and then observes that, on a grander scale, “social media” as a whole has its own larger cult following. Another great idea, and one that I wholeheartedly agree with. But I feel like there was a real missed opportunity here to analyze the language patterns of “performative wokeness” on social media. That culture, as much as any other explored in the book, has it’s own (evolving, and sometimes opaque) lists of things that are right to say or wrong to say. There was much (deserved) critique of Donald Trump’s demagoguery, and a comprehensive deconstruction of the ascendancy of Q-Anon… but without even an attempt to analyze any contemporary, left-leaning cultural phenomena (this, coming from a hard left-winger), sections of the book ultimately came across as lacking in self-awareness.

I did really like the voice of the author, and thought she was after the right things… a large part of me wants to just chalk this one up to poor editorial decision-making. Since this book centers around topics that I am interested by, it was still fun to read, and I’ll continue to follow this author.