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AnarchyintheLC
Sep 19, 2013AnarchyintheLC rated this title 1.5 out of 5 stars
The subject is not what you would expect from the title. I found the emphasis was much less on human identity and interactions with technology, and a lot more about bitterness over who owns content on the internet and who is able to make money from internet-related products and services. Even though the internet and piracy damage some people's and companies' livelihoods, Lanier's insistence that the internet can't be used to generate income for creative projects rings a little hollow (especially considering some of the new niches, like publish-on-demand books, small webcomics and blogs that can now generate a huge following and get some income via fan products or books, or the "freemium" model for software or games). He also completely ignores the possibility that there can be motivations for creative work other than profit. The possibility of doing creative work on a less than full-time basis is also ignored, even though there are lots of reasons why someone might divide their time between multiple projects or vocations. All in all, I finished this book because I naturally resist abandoning something once I've started reading it. I don't recommend this to anyone who already has an interest in tech and knows the basic issues. There is not a lot of food for thought here (although there are some spectacularly bad ideas proposed that were sort of fascinating, "songles" being one of them.) Lanier's impressions of trends are often thrown out without any data to back them up.