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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
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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.
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