Technology | 2010.02.20
Steven Poole's non-fiction roundup | Book reviews
Steven Poole\'s non-fiction roundup
You Are Not a Gadget , by Jaron Lanier (Allen Lane, £20)
We do not lack currently for critiques of the TwitFaceTube world, but Lanier, as a virtual-reality pioneer, inventor and musician, has a special authority and his dazzling polemic springs not from a morose Luddism but from an insistence that things ought to be made better. Tearing apart the ruling ideologies of Silicon Valley\'s "cybernetic totalism" and its "antihuman rhetoric" – the over-reliance on the "wisdom of crowds", the elevation of the network or the "cloud" over the individual and the "fragment" over the whole, the fetish of "free", the jejune worship of the mash-up, and the wan acquiescence to the hegemony of advertising – Lanier ranges impressively over the disciplines of computer science, economics, biology and philosophy, often joking but always serious.
There is hardly a page that does not contain some fascinating provocation on the economics of art or the philosophy of engineering, and Lanier is a dashing phrasemaker ("information is alienated experience"). He usefully points out the contingencies of technological history (personal computing didn\'t have to be arranged around the concept of "files", but now that metaphor is probably "locked in" for ever), and though most of the book is a savagely sustained exercise in "deprogramming through immersion", he also offers intriguing ideas as to how things could be improved. What\'s more, any author who can write that he feels "cephalopod envy" (the desire to be more like a squid) is to be treasured.
Privacy: A Very Short Introduction , by Raymond Wacks (Oxford, £7.99)
Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, once said: "Privacy is dead. Get over it." One wonders whether uncareful users of Facebook and the like, happily packaging their life-fragments as datamining fodder to what Lanier calls "the lords of the cloud", have actually got over it, or whether they simply do not realise what they\'re doing. This book by a professor of law covers such issues as well as CCTV, wiretapping, biometric IDs, paparazzi photos, or the uncomfortable fact that doctors tend to carry medical records around on unsecured memory sticks. Fruitfully, it unpacks the often-fuzzy idea of "privacy" with reference to the legal traditions of the UK, the US and other jurisdictions, arguing that "the generous extension of privacy to \'decisional\' matters (abortion, contraception, sexual preference) and the (understandable) conflation with freedom and autonomy that it engenders, is a mistake"; the emphasis should be instead on the protection of "personal information".
Fatal System Error , by Joseph Menn (PublicAffairs, £15.99)
More freelance kinds of electronic intrusion are the story here, as FT business reporter Menn spins racy tales of true-life cybercrime. An American whiz-kid protects American online-betting businesses run out of Costa Rica from a gang of Russian hacker-extortionists, who are soon also being chased down by a British agent of the Hi-Tech Crime Unit (as was), who on the way has a vodka-fuelled picnic punchup with his investigative ally, a Russian colonel. The villains glory in handles such as "Bra1n", and the heroes are portrayed respectively as Matthew Broderick from Wargames and Daniel Craig\'s Bond, but the narrative glitter is sprinkled on top of serious and thorough reporting. Menn concludes: "A number of enormously powerful national governments, especially those of Russia and China, have picked the blossoming of the internet age as the time to ally with organised crime." One is tickled to learn that, in the late 1990s, the Queen sternly informed Tony Blair that "she wanted Britain safe for online business". Who knew HM was so hip to digital culture?
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/201[...]even-pooles-nonfiction-roundup
