Reviews and Comments

The archeological rigor and discovery explained in this book do indeed shed new light on our arrogant and foreordained conceptions of prehistory and the development and status of what has become known as "civilization." I have always found the notion of near-instantaneous "revolutions," whether agriculture, industrial, or computer, to be inherently questionable (and most often preceded by a blizzard of trial and error and half-steps and experimentation over centuries). I find it much easier to believe in an ebb, neap, and rip tide of different intellectual and cultural phenomena and traditions (moving into and back from the cultural shore that it changes) to be a more likely scenario. The new archeology would appear to support such a story.

If I have a misgiving about this book, it is the authors' sharp tongue for what amounts to enlightenment political philosophers who, while they may have had their views of the nature of man, were neither archeologists nor social scientists, and lacked the wealth of modern discoveries and tools available to these authors. So too, the work of prehistory scholars (such as Gordon Childe, Robert Redfield, Henri Frankfort, and many others) is dismissed readily, some sub silentio, for want of the more modern discoveries, when many of these older scholars took pains to point out the anomalies in what record they did have, which they could not resolve. Finally, this is a book about prehistory, not history. It spends scant time discussing the impact of writing on cultural development, and concedes in its silence on the point that it is mostly making informed judgements from a physical record, rather than reading how prior cultures and periods conceived of themselves. Notwithstanding these minor matters, this is a book not to be missed (as many others have concluded).

You might very well shelve this book after the first 30 pages wondering how on Earth this philosophy academic's staccato digressions into the minds of Enlightenment rationalists will be made relevant to today's internet. In doing so, you will have mistaken the author's object in writing the book for the one you might have expected (a book consumed with the problems of the internet you know ). While such topics are occasionally referenced -- the propensity of social media to leverage inflammatory commentary or to proliferate untruths -- the book is far more concerned with putting the entirety of the internet in the context of broader scientific, historical, and philosophical themes. With further reading, you will learn, and likely enjoy learning, about today's internet (i.e. the IOT, social media, 3D printing, collection and presentation of learned texts) as part of a continuous development of natural, mechanical, and logical reckoning, calculating, production, and telecommunications machines and modalities (real, desired, and fanciful). The rationalists are discussed largely as recognizing and explaining the aspect of mind that realized and promoted this progression, including seeing in the then-modern looms the calculating machine that made them run. It's a great book for those who keep their aperture on the internet broad.

This was a satisfying and useful read. The pages turned quickly. In my case, the author provided greater depth of understanding about many (often crazy) conspiracy theories that one reads about in passing in newspapers and journals. More significantly, the author unifies them in fundamental ways and explains their growth and mutation. My negative criticism of this book is limited as it is mild. In one case the author appears to make a false equivalency of misplaced and opposed conspiracies on the left and right of the political spectrum. It is fair to say that the United States has a rich history of secretive Government intelligence agencies and military-industrial intrigue justifying some kind of "Deep State" notion, it is quite another to go out on the Trumpublican limb, where the Government writ large is an enemy of the people. By contrast, while there are some limits to which the rational mind will not go in theorizing about the Trump Administration's seeming affection for autocrats (especially Putin), and the manner in which his Administration and political team was mired in Russian money, cutouts, assistance, and intelligence agents -- the fact of that relationship and reliance was pregnant and unquestionable to all but the brain dead among us. To the extent that the author's concluding chapter can be read as posing an equivalence between Deep State theorizers of the Trumpublican ilk and "Russiagate," it is in error. The Russia hoax is mostly a hoax itself.

This book is now 28 years old, and it shows. That's not an indictment of the book though. It just doesn't fit very well with the American political narrative of the 21st Century, which takes no prisoners, admits no fault, concedes nothing, and consigns moderation and the reality of Government operations (both its successes and failures) to footnotes in a more aspirational diatribe about what this or that faction views as success or fair. Nevertheless, it's a great book that observes some enduring truths about a delusional American public that divorces the notion of "special interests" from the self-interest (for which they all advocate daily in the American political process and National dialog - personally and in the aggregate through their many lobbies, left and right). It's always the other guy's interest that is "special" and theirs that is National. They probably screamed like stuck pigs about the publication of these truths in 1994, but would do so even more in 2022 -- where successful businesses are either rightly condemned for contorting the field of competition with the levers of Government or wrongly held in contempt for too ably turning a buck and not treating their employees like shareholders and CEOs, and usually both. It is the same America where people without means and ready financial recourse are asked to subsist in perpetuity and, perhaps, regarded as heros for their cheapened sweat and risk-taking, but then condemned as malingerers or cheats for accepting assistance. Yet, means-testing is an apostasy. And, to all of this, politicians will agree, add to the national debt, keep dated or failing programs knee-deep in debt-financed funds, depriving themselves of the opportunity to fund or even recognize necessary new programs or those that require current emphasis. This book will find few friends. That's too bad.

This is the kind of book one savors -- a page here, a chapter there, a little pondering, and then a little more. The book was not dense, but it was worth pausing for contemplation. By the time I completed it, at the pace of the Information Age, it was already venerable. If I could recommend one book that explains the positive potential and likely pitfalls of the maturing Information Age, this would be it. As I finished the book, the Democratic primary for the 2020 U.S. Presidential election took shape. Concerning the world we will likely face in the short- and medium- term future, as described by this book, Andrew Yang "gets it" -- the others, not so much. Although we are in charge of our destinies, if there is an irreducible inevitability of change guaranteed by the Information Age, his platform positions are closest to dealing with it. This is not a campaign plug, as much more may be required -- just an intellectual continuity I noticed. Great reading.