The authors clearly had a great idea, but this book ends up containing a lot of nonsense, bluster, and outright garbage. Too bad: I would have loved to read the book that it promised to be. There are real implications of our increasingly networked society; changes to dynamics of power and control. Unfortunately, the authors are too busy tying themselves in knots of their own psychobabble to sort any of it out.

I don't think that the authors really understand the technology whose implications on society they purport to review. Anyone who's taken a course in computer networking will understand that there are no political implications in the maxim "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send," enshrined in RFC 1122. That is a guideline for implementing a software system and nothing else. One chapter includes a series of "fork bombs", little Perl scripts intended to crash a computer if they're run. They inserted in the text without comment, as a way to make the authors look smart, but any script kiddie could have looked up these little programs on the Internet. Why present them here? Turn to the end of the book and you'll see the authors' own "programming language" full of idiotic constructs that in the end add nothing to the book. Obviously, it's not intended to be implemented anywhere, but it also doesn't further anyone's point to include some Duchampian computer language. How childish.