Against the Machine: How the Web Is Reshaping Culture and Commerce--And Why It Matters

From the author hailed by the New York Times Book Review for his drive-by brilliance and dubbed by the New York Times Magazine as one of the countrys most eloquent and acid-tongued critics comes a ruthless challenge to the conventional wisdom about the most consequential cultural development of our time: the Internet. Of course the Internet is not one thing or another; if anything, its boosters claim, the Web is everything at once. Its become not only our primary medium for communication and information but also the place we go to shop, to play, to debate, to find love. Lee Siegel argues that our ever-deepening immersion in life online doesnt just reshape the ordinary rhythms of our days; it also reshapes our minds and culture, in ways with which we havent yet reckoned. The web and its cultural correlatives and by-productssuch as the dominance of reality television and the rise of the bourgeois bohemianhave turned privacy into performance, play into commerce, and confused self-expression with art. And even as technology gurus ply their trade using the language of freedom and democracy, we cede more and more control of our freedom and individuality to the needs of the machinethat confluence of business and technology whose boundaries now stretch to encompass almost all human activity. Siegels argument isnt a Luddite intervention against the Internet itself but rather a bracing appeal for us to contend with how it is transforming us all. Dazzlingly erudite, full of startlingly original insights, and buoyed by sharp wit, Against the Machine will force you to see our culturefor better and worsein an entirely new way.