Purchase

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Books-A-Million

Indie BookShop

Ripped Bodice

Add to Wish List

Also by Lee Siegel:

Against the Machine, February 2008
Hardcover
Not Remotely Controlled, August 2007
Paperback

AGAINST THE MACHINE
By: Lee Siegel

Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob

Spiegel & Grau
February 2008
On Sale: January 22, 2008
192 pages
ISBN: 0385522657
EAN: 9780385522656
Hardcover
Add to Wish List

Non-Fiction

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 country’s 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. It’s 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 doesn’t just reshape the ordinary rhythms of our days; it also reshapes our minds and culture, in ways with which we haven’t yet reckoned. The web and its cultural correlatives and by-products—such as the dominance of reality television and the rise of the “bourgeois bohemian”—have 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 machine—that confluence of business and technology whose boundaries now stretch to encompass almost all human activity.

Siegel’s argument isn’t 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 culture—for better and worse—in an entirely new way.

Media Buzz

Daily Show with Jon Stewart - February 25, 2008
Daily Show with Jon Stewart - February 14, 2008