Books That Matter 2022

 Lots of books are published each year, and many of them contribute in some way: they inform, remember, correct the record, advance a new idea, edify, inspire and/or entertain.  But there are a smaller number of books that matter.

Though what matters can mean different things.  Some books matter because of their consequences over time.  Novels (like plays, movies and songs) can become beloved, or in the overused term, "iconic" or even "classic." Typically they speak to different people in different ways, saying different things to each.  Yet they remain memorable for many, and eventually become cultural touchstones that nearly everyone knows at least a little.  

However, identifying such books is best accomplished years afterwards.  Less time needs to pass perhaps to see a novel's influence in the world.  For example, Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry of the Future, published almost two years ago,  has clearly become a book that matters.  Not only is it the author's best-selling novel but it has entered into, and in some ways focused, discussions on how to address the climate crisis future, not only in the U.S. but perhaps even more strongly in Europe and internationally.  Richard Powers' two most recent novels, The Overstory and Bewilderment, have also exerted strong responses and focused emotions, inquiry and discussion on a range of related topics: not just forest issues, but questions of what constitutes life and intelligence, and the relationships of humans to the rest of life--what is increasingly called the "more than human world."   

Nonfiction books can perhaps be more easily identified more quickly as books that matter.  Published nearly a decade ago now, Thomas Picketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is clearly a book that matters.  Applying contemporary economic and historical analysis to very basic questions, Picketty both inspired and coalesced important thinking about basic changes in economic structures needed to make a stable and better future.  Its analysis of the failures of today's economic order and prevailing conservative philosophy, particularly showing the dangers of the huge gaps between the few at the top and everyone else, has become influential even to approaches less radical than Picketty might favor, such as a simple return to the Keynesian economics that prevailed in the U.S. from FDR until Reagan.  That analysis which shows that prosperity is attained by supporting the middle class and public sector investment is becoming U.S. policy again under the Biden administration, in what journalist Michael Tomasky is calling Middle-Out Economics, the title of his new book: perhaps a candidate for a book that matters. (In the meantime, this Politico piece and interview is a good summary.)

But books can matter before their influence is measured simply by being crucial contributions on crucial topics. They are groundbreaking in important ways, though not necessarily unique.  Their importance depends as well on how riveting they are to read.  I have several candidates for books that matter on this basis, published in the past year or so.  It's not an exhaustive list; perhaps the minimum.  The order in which I present them does not imply rank.  What links them is that they present in a generous if not full way a dramatically new synthesis that tells us something startling about our world that upends conventional wisdom and offers a new framework for perceiving and acting in the world.  In that sense, they bring the news.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber and David Wengrow

Published towards the end of last year, this book is already influencing newer work.  Its scope is enormous: nothing less than the human story.  The linear story of development (or evolution of society) is a comfortable one for many reasons.  It simplifies textbook categories, and it leads logically and inevitably to contemporary "advanced" societies, the apex of it all: from caveman to capitalism.  Who loves this story?  The same type folks who extracted "Social Darwinism" from the complexities of Darwinian evolution.  Robber barons like John D. Rockerfeller and Andrew Carnegie saw that it was good, and gave it their monied blessings.

According to the two Davids, both archaeologists, the story is wrong, right from the beginning. Modern humans weren't the sole apex of evolution--other humanoids had real societies, too, with all the elements of intelligence and expression.  We carry some of their genes. 

Society did not develop or even change from hunter-gatherer to agricultural to urban.  All these forms coexisted and intermingled, and there were many hybrids.  There were urban societies without kings or rulers, and tyrannical hunter-gatherers.  The Davids may be a little judgey in their descriptions of the varieties of Native (North and South) American societies, but they make their point--they were not simple or primitive or identical; they were often sophisticated, complex, various and sometimes large.  

This book emphasized an historical point that has since been taken up by others: that the form of democracy that governed the Six Nations Confederacy (the Haudenosaunee) that lasted longer than our democracy has so far, was patiently explained to Benjamin Franklin and others by some of its leaders, and informed the formation of the non-Native American democracy.  Too bad it didn't also adopt the Prime Directive of the  Haudenosaunee: in all decisions take into account the seventh generation to come.

This book of 692 pages is replete with examples, written with verve and wit, so it can read like a wonder book.  We don't really need Marvel or the other purveyors of outsized fantasies:  it's there in the histories that have either only recently discovered or studied, or conveniently ignored because they complicate or contradict the main story--the one that has gone a long way towards the fix we're in, on the brink of destroying it all.

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

by Ed Yong 

In Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory, the character that most readers noted and remembered is a woman scientist who discovers that trees in a forest communicate with each other, and help each other chemically to ward off disease.  She is ridiculed by scandalized scientists and forced out of academia until her research is vindicated, and she becomes a kind of folk hero.

 This character is based on a real life researcher, Suzanne Simard, whose book Finding the Mother Tree subsequently became popular.  But even more popular was a book on the same theme published a few years earlier by forester Peter Wohlleben, with the more arresting title The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate.

 That book’s success, expanding on revelations about the complex life of the forest, led to a series of similar books by Wohlleben and many others, with titles often beginning with “The Hidden Life of” or “The Secret Life of” various animals, plants and other natural phenomena, including ice.  These books reflected new research but also observations that had gone unnoticed or derided because they contradicted established views on the natural world as comprised of simple if sometimes mysterious living objects, of interest mostly as exploitable for human ends.

 All of this helped prepare readers for the June 2022 publication of An Immense World by the much praised science journalist Ed Yong. It turns out that everything has a life hidden to humans, partly because our current preconceptions block awareness, but also because other lifeforms experience the world in vastly different ways.

 The key concept here is umwelt, named by early 20^th century zoologist Jakob von Uexkull.  It refers to the sensory world of animals, determined by what senses they have and what they can do.  As Yong demonstrates through scientists he visits, these vary considerably.  Some creatures taste with their feet, others hear ultrasound or see into the ultraviolet. They may sense electromagnetic waves.

   Senses that we share with other animals are used in different ways, and the balance among them can be radically different.  Dogs smell and hear better than they see—so their world is one of aroma trails.  Even their color vision is different, and one of the more startling illustrations in this book compares the colors in a typical room that we see, and how dogs see them.

Though sometimes based on dismissed and forgotten insights, most of the research is new, as scientists use new technologies to dispel old assumptions.  That birds can’t smell is one of them, but there are many more.  Some of these discoveries are astonishing:  for instance, the vocalizations and communication that goes on out of human hearing range.  We can detect only a fraction of whales’ songs, and it turns out that mice sing to each other.  At some points this book starts to sound like Douglas Adams’ humorous takes in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (that mice actually run experiments on humans, that dolphins can escape human catastrophe) may have more substance than expected.

 Apart from the wondrous details, there are larger points here.  Humans assumed a lot about other life based on their own sensorium, but we’ve missed quite a lot.  “Our Umwelt is still limited; it just doesn’t feel that way.  To us, it feels all-encompassing.  It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know.  This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.”

 But science and other forms of observation at the service of human imagination can help us see not only some of the ways other lifeforms live and communicate, but how our own activities disrupt their lives.  Light pollution wreaks havoc on various birds and other animals; noise pollution in the oceans endangers whales and other sea creatures.  

Despite the book's length, Yong's precise but informal voice and his flourishes of wit make it eminently readable, yet the science reporting itself is admirable. Even the footnotes are interesting reading. It helps that what the science is reporting remains continuously fascinating. 

 This research has greatly complicated human conceptions of what other lifeforms are, and expands the notions, extent and range of sentience and intelligence. It is this theme that James Bridle takes up in his book.

 Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for Planetary Intelligence

By James Bridle 

Bridle writes and thinks chiefly about technologies, and his disquiet about the direction and limitations of artificial intelligence sent him to explore other kinds of intelligences in the natural world.

 Again, the concept of Umwelt is evoked. Bridle also refers to both Richard Powers’ The Overstory and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future as starting points for his own explorations.  He ranges far and wide, from our humanoid ancestors to the intelligence of slime mold, and applies his observations to the new machines.  “The idea of forming new relationships with non-human intelligence is the central theme of this book,” he writes.  “It emanates from a wider and deeper dawning: the increasingly evident and pressing reality of our utter entanglement with the more-than-human world.”

 Bridle’s cogent and provocative musings apply not only to the possible futures of machine intelligence but, as Yong’s book does, to the endangered life of this planet and the necessity to actively preserve it.  As we discover and admit the extent of intelligent life and its beautiful complexity, we are close to destroying it.

 The singular and expressive organization of information and the inspired insights more than compensate for some slackness and an editorial lapse or two. Bridle's ideas and their expression in this book merit serious attention.

This recent run of books on non-human life, culminating so far in Yong and Bridle, should end any credibility given to the traditional notion of animals as natural automatons, important only as they are useful to humans, with no feelings to consider or intelligence to respect and learn from.  Gaia expanded the definition of life, and now we grapple with kinds of intelligence not only in familiar animals but plants, microbes and other life. We'd better start learning.

 One of the ideas that Bridle interrogates is the notion promoted by digital industries and other enthusiasts that intelligence is primarily based on calculation.  That is a theme in the latest novel by Dave Eggers.

 The Every: Or At Last A Sense of Order, Or The Final Days of Free Will, or Limitless Choice is Killing The World

A novel by Dave Eggers 

The Hollywood pitch for this novel might be Alice in Wonderland meets Nineteen Eighty-Four, or perhaps Brave New World would be a closer match to its onrushing dystopia.

 In this stand-alone sequel to Eggers’ The Circle, the Facebook-like corporation has merged with Amazon (referred to here as the Jungle) to form a monopolistic continuum, not only of business, not only of culture, but of shared reality.  Welcome to The Every.

 Delaney is a young woman intent on destroying The Every from the inside.  She is intelligent, intuitive, creative and acutely observant, but the plot hinges on her also being repeatedly naïve about the outcome of her efforts, as she proposes a series of outrageous changes that turn out to be big hits with The Every users, which seems to include Everyone.

 Eggers is not shy about stating his theme early in the novel: “the war on subjectivity.”  Everything is objectified to decision by calculation. (This includes the maximum number of allowable pages in a readable novel, which is 577—as it happens, the exact length of this book.) Ironically this also results in the disappearance of actual objects and authentic life, in favor of digital imagery and ideological judgments.  The result is a society caught in self-referential stasis, that punishes difference. 

 The novel does not fall easily into political categories. It exposes corporate conformism, but also its effect of cancel culture. The reasons (or excuses) given for much of the social pressure to conform are to save the environment and promote social justice.

 Delaney is a former forest ranger, so it may have seemed natural to her to organize an outing of The Every employees to visit Pacific Coast seals, but it was a disaster from start to finish, especially when they were confronted with the realities of these animals and their lives.  This incident is outrageously exaggerated and yet totally believable, and ultimately dystopic, especially given what these previous books tell us.

 It’s also funny, as is the novel generally, in a Dr. Strangelove sort of way. It has some characteristics of a satire of a monomanical corporate culture becoming a monoculture at large. Delaney’s best friend and fellow skeptic is the first to succumb to The Every’s embrace, supplying a horror movie vibe (think Invasion of the Body Snatchers.)  Delaney’s own fate involves a confrontation with the head of The Every, who was the naïve young woman protagonist of The Circle.

 There are many other related issues raised in the novel, in an entertaining narrative context that feels real right now.  The story is in development for a TV series, but right now this is a book that matters.

These four books matter because they give us crucial new information that creates a new context of how we see the world, our society and ourselves.  Right now there is no more important context that the relationship of humanity to the rest of life, and secondarily to the digital life humans are creating (for if we don't solve the survival problems associated with the first, the second won't much matter.)  They are robust enough to generate further discussion, and they cry out for action. 

Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program
 By David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek
MIT Press

 Forty-five years ago today, a human being first set foot on another world. Some 600 million people on Earth were watching and listening as Neil Armstrong descended to the surface of the Moon from the Apollo 11 lunar lander, saying (in words slightly obscured by static) "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

 Earlier in this 45th anniversary year, MIT Press published Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program by David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek. I liked everything about this book except the title, which suggests a conscious and coordinated campaign of hype and spin. The book's contents tell a different story. Though NASA and the major corporations involved in this titanic effort all had public relations and marketing people, NASA set the standard by insisting that the media be given full factual information. There was plenty of hoopla surrounding the astronauts in particular, but a lot of that was generated by media responding to the burst of public interest that caught everyone by surprise.

 As this book says (and other sources affirm), well into the 1950s the idea of rocketing humans into space was considered to be science fiction fantasy, believed only by children. The Eisenhower administration itself was skeptical, though the U.S. government was confident that its plans to send a satellite into orbit as part of the 1957-8 International Geophysical Year would be the first such endeavor.

 But early in the 50s, some magazine articles accompanied by dramatic cover art in Colliers plus the 3 Walt Disney programs beginning with "Man in Space" stirred some public interest. Then came the shock of Soviet space firsts--the first satellite (Sputnik), the first live animal, the first man and the first woman in Earth orbit. Humans in space was no longer a fantasy.

 After a few disasters (including at least one on live TV), the U.S. Army and Navy succeeded in getting satellites up. The civilian agency NASA was created, and suddenly the astronauts became heroic celebrities. After two sub-orbital flights, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. Shortly afterwards, President John F. Kennedy issued his famous challenge: to land a man on the Moon and return him safely before the end of the 1960s.

 After a string of successful one-person flights (the Mercury program) and two-person orbits mostly testing procedures and equipment for the moon shot (Gemini), the Apollo program began with an horrific tragedy: during a ground test, a fire aboard the crew capsule killed three astronauts, including the second American in space, Virgil Grissom. After months of reappraisal and redesign, Apollo flights began, and continued at a pretty rapid clip that kept the astronauts in the news and built to the moment of Apollo 11.

 But for the next 6 Apollo flights, public interest dropped gradually and then precipitously. "Few people alive on December 14, 1972, can tell you where they were on that day," this book notes. But it was the day that the last humans to ever go there left the moon. No one has been back since.

 This book continues examining the coverage and marketing efforts after Apollo 11 and speculates on why interest dropped so far so fast. Television coverage of the space program increased network news prestige--particularly CBS--but lost money, so after Armstrong it was cut back severely. Other factors are suggested, notably that the goal of landing an American on the moon was basically Cold War competition with the Soviets, and after Apollo 11, it was game over, the home team won.

 The authors also note how much else was going on to absorb public attention, and having lived through those years, that's certainly pertinent: the Vietnam war and associated actions in Southeast Asia, antiwar demonstrations, racial unrest, Kent State, the 1972 presidential campaign and the first Watergate stories were all happening between Apollo 11 and 17.

The book repeats the assertion that the rise of the environmental movement in those years--partly inspired not at all ironically by the now iconic views of Earth in space, and the "earthrise" photos from the moon taken by Apollo astronauts--diverted attention from out there.

All of that I recall as at least partially true.  But there was also the relentless pace of U.S. space flights. I saw them all on TV, from Explorer and Vanguard in 1958 through the Apollo shots more than a decade later. I don't think people were totally fixated on the winning the space race aspect, but nobody could sustain excitement and the same keen interest for all those events. Rockets to space were getting to be a regular thing.

 Also, NASA had apparently concentrated so hard on getting humans to the Moon that they didn't come up with much for them to do there that was interesting, such as scientific exploration and experiments that could be communicated in an involving and exciting way.

 This book does an admirable job of chronicling how NASA and the institutions involved got the information out, and how the media went about covering the stories. There was a marketing concern, since it was felt that public interest would encourage Congress to keep funding the space program, but there were also concerns to keep commercialism from tainting the patriotic effort, leading to a shifting dance on what corporations could and couldn't do to publicize their part of the space program. (Apart from major contractors, the winner on becoming identified with the astronauts was clearly Tang. If you were there, you know what I'm talking about.)

 This is a large format "coffee-table" book with lots of photos and sidebars. Written by two public relations professionals, it not only tells the public information story but features enough documentary information (including transcripts of key Apollo moments) to be a good resource on the space program itself. It seems to fulfill the NASA ideal of being as objective and complete as possible. Though this was supposedly the Mad Men era, and there was a circus aspect to events like the parades and tours, this book affirms that there really was a feeling of common purpose that permeated the space program and extended to the media. The story of humans in space, of humanity on the Moon, was so powerful and inspiring that it often overrode selfishness and spin.

 Today we know how many things went wrong as the Eagle was trying to land on July 20, 1969. But somehow it did land, and that moment inspires awe even today. Perhaps even more so, since such a voyage has returned to the realm of fantasy, only with better visual effects.

Robot Futures
By Illah Reza Nourbakhsh
MIT Press

Forget the scary scenarios and dire special effects of our recently concluded Apocalypse Summer at the cinema.  Don't even bother anticipating the next climate crisis report.  This book is really frightening about a future that's coming on fast, and will be here in a decade or so. And we're really not ready for it, at all.

First of all, what is a robot?  Machine intelligence in a human-like shape, hostile or friendly?  An impressive tangle of arms and pistons making cars in the modern factory?  These images and the issues they raise just scratch the surface.  Nourbakhsh, who is Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, breaks down the functions to perception, action and cognition (which is "the ability to reason, to make decisions about what to do next.")  Robots have these in unequal measure, but together they exist or will exist with effects we can only imagine (and Nourbakhsh does.)  We aren't necessarily on a direct path to Robbie the Robot or even Data the android, "but rather on the road to a strange stable of mechanical creatures that have both subhuman and superhuman qualities all jumbled together, and this near future is for us, not just for our descendants."

Some of the most powerful robots aren't even physical in any familiar sense.  They operate mostly or entirely in cyberspace. They gather and analyze information and make decisions based on it.  Some are already doing so, helping marketers to not only learn consumer preferences but manipulate choices, and even set different prices for the same product for individual consumers.  Add inputs like cameras, and robots can predict what a consumer will like based on the make of the car pulling into the driveway.

Physical robots will also be different from our preconceptions--they will be larger and much smaller than people, able to see in the dark, snake through wreckage to sense survivors, and probably leap tall buildings in a single bound.  As microprocessors and sensors get smaller and more energy efficient, all kinds of robots for amusement as well as mischief become possible, and as costs drop and designs are standardized, they will become ubiquitous.  With 3-D printing, maybe even uncontrollable. "We will not be able to distinguish potential Borg from homebrew."

More complex robots will also be possible because all the information doesn't have to be stored within it--the robot's brain will link to the immensity of the Internet.  Some of the traditional issues will arise, though: when robots look like people or even like dogs, in what sense are they alive?  Is cruelty to robots even possible?  How do you act when you can't tell if the voice on the phone belongs to a robot or a human being?

Nourbakhsh communicates a lot of information in this small book, about what's possible now, what the limitations are and how soon they're likely to be overcome, as well as what's on the drawing board or could be.  He also produces future dialogues and scenarios that do what stories can do best--show us the possible effects of these technologies in the real world.  These are perhaps the most effective--and scariest--parts of the book.  Especially the stories based on something that's already happened.

He suggests that the most important effects may be the unintended consequences of decisions made by individuals, companies and other entities without sufficient regard for the public good.  He offers some ideas for turning potential horrors around before they happen, and suggests "we should become more deliberate and considered as we imagine and design technologies that carry us forward."  Knowing what we might face is the motivating first step, and this book helps us take it.  It should be widely read by all who care about the future they or anyone they care about will live in.  Meanwhile, there's a website: robotfutures.org.

Books for the Future

In new nonfiction books I have a prejudice: I look for books that may tell me the future.  Books that might contribute to a better understanding of the most important factors likely to govern the future, and that suggest action and attitudes to make a better future, and certainly to forestall a much worse one.

Environmental topics are prominent among them.  I've reviewed here and elsewhere some of the major and also some of the lesser known but worthy books specifically on the climate crisis.  Here are glimpses of several more pertinent books:

Small, Gritty and Green: The Promise of America's Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World by Catherine Tumber (MIT Press) is a model of the most valuable books for the future: it is on a specific but under-appreciated topic, it is very current and above all it is a laudable combination of thorough and relevant research (and reporting on such research), and it is well-organized, well written and readable, with useful notes, bibliography and index.

Millions of people live in these smaller cities, mostly in the northeast and midwest, that have rich histories but are neglected and generally ignored.  Tumber makes the case that these cities can not only be saved, but can be vital elements in the low-carbon future we must have if civilization is to have a continuous future at all.  These are cities like Syracuse, Youngstown and Hartford, but some of her findings and ideas can apply to the larger industrial cities now in various stages of confusion or deterioration.  Tumber stresses that this is a personal and even idiosyncratic book, involving personal experience as well as history and journalism.  Yet she comes up with very specific ideas on how these cities can contribute to a clean energy economy.

Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering by Clive Hamilton (Yale). However they reflect the moment, some of these books are destined to become reference works for the near future.  This is certainly one, for intentional climate engineering (as opposed to the unknowing kind that has been going on for more than a century, and still goes on even as we know better)  is still mostly a set of early ideas.  Yet because those ideas and research are being funded largely by the loose billions of fossil fuel and related companies, there is much impetus behind the scenes.  At the same time, Hamilton writes, "There is almost no information on public attitudes to geoengineering for the simple reason that almost no one has yet heard of it."

 This current research is apparently intended to offer technological fixes that won't require a switch from fossil fuel energy. Geoengineering projects are roundly criticized for their ineffectiveness and especially the foolhardy dangers they pose to the global environment.  Hamilton divulges who is doing what right now, and raises the practical and ethical issues involved.  Because such powerful interests are behind geoengineering, and also because some aspects of it may not require much technology or expenditure (and could even become a form of terrorism), this is a necessary book, a primer for the near future.

The Incidental Steward: Reflections on Citizen Science by Akiko Busch (Yale)  For a long time the observation and even experimentation applied to the natural world was conducted by amateurs, by monks in gardens and part-time naturalists.  They were motivated by curiosity and wonder, and often by an intense involvement and fierce love for the nature in the place they lived.  Busch updates this impulse to the computer age, in the course of describing her involvement with her home grounds of the Hudson river valley.  As a physical book it feels good in the hand, with paper and print meant to last.  Therefore it serves the savoring kind of reading it deserves.  Her fundamental point is itself important: it is the citizen scientist--like indigenous ancestors--who are vital to the future of nature, and therefore to the future.

Birthright: People and Nature in the Modern World by Stephen R. Kellert (Yale).  Kellert is something of an expert in the relation of humans to the rest of nature, and in this book he explores ways in which humans at various stages in their lives are naturally affiliated with nature, borrowing E.O. Wilson's term of biophilia.  His observations are wide-ranging, and the book includes personal observations of nature and scenarios of possible futures.  This relation of humans to the rest of nature is essential to our well-being, to who we are.  But we are in danger of destroying our own birthright.  Kellert makes a comprehensive case for why we must be conscious of this and act with it in mind to make sure future generations can claim this birthright.

Those who assume an apocalyptic future often do so based on an interpretation of evolutionary science and natural selection.  It is true that the dominant interpretations have stressed individuals engaged in a selfish survival of the fittest, and those manifest aspects of animal life that counteract this dominant view have been ignored and under-studied.  But new research is redressing the balance.

Two new books from MIT Press are good examples of these newly robust areas of study.  From Groups to Individuals: Evolution and Emerging Individuality, a collection edited by Frederick Bouchard and Phillippe Huneman  reviews research within the context of the move away from organisms as the primary agent of evolution, taking into consideration however not only constituents of what we describe as organisms, but groups.  What makes individuality turns out to be a lot more complicated in biology as philosophers, psychologists and other social scientists have found applied to humans.  This is a nice sized book, sturdy and illustrated with drawings and charts.  This seems an exciting academic field right now, with important implications for our general understanding, and our approach to our future.

The same may be said of Cooperation and Its Evolution, a collected edited by Kim Sterelny, Richard Joyce, Brett Calcott and Ben Fraser.  Topics range from microbiology to human philosophy, and while animal cooperation is explored, the emphasis is on the human.  With more than 500 pages of text in a hefty but easy to handle volume, many current issues and arguments are explored.  This is the latest contribution to bringing research together to see where we stand.  In general, the idea that there is an evolutionary basis for cooperation is becoming more and more acceptable, and freed from the constraints of seeming heresy, how cooperation and conscious decision-making for a better common future can be achieved is an exciting area for creative research and theories.

Within the world of political action, there are books about under-appreciated elements of the present that are forming and in some cases threatening the future.  Occupy the Future, a Boston Review volume published by MIT Press, is a group of essays edited by David Grusky, Doug McAdam, Rob Reich and Debra Satz.  It emerged from the Occupy Wall Street movement, but the book is not about the movement itself.  It describes the current major income inequality in America--the vast proportion of wealth in the hands of a very few--and its current and future implications.  It looks at the causes and effects, and suggests remedies.  In nearly 250 pages of text, it goes into some detail, and at the very least is informative about today's workplace and the effects of computerization, globalization etc.  The breakdown of chapters is well organized, and some individual chapters go into detail.  It's longer than the Boston Review books I've seen, but it's still a handy paperback size, though a sturdy hardback.

Finally, there's the impact of the still evolving universe of computing and cyberspace on the future that is becoming the present every day.  The latest history to provide some perspective is On Computing: The Fourth Great Scientific Domain by Paul S. Rosenbloom (MIT).  But this is more than a history--the author is arguing that computing joins the physical sciences, life sciences and social sciences as a separate domain: information transformation.  The incredible growth of computing has regularly been accompanied by outsized claims that turn out to be both less and more than the truth.  This is a provocative thesis, which will likely occupy speculation and study for awhile to come.

An occupational hazard of books about the fast-changing world formed by computing is instant obsolescence.  Still, reports such as Crowdsourcing by Daren C. Brabham (MIT) are valuable as snapshots of the present (or recent past) and especially as indications of direction for the immediate future, and expression of potential uses.  This is a well organized and thorough treatment of the phenomenon and related research, in a handy-sized volume, a paperback with the publishing quality of a hardback.

Then there are books that reflect an emerging field that makes particular use of computing potential and behavior while advocating for it.  Digital Humanities (MIT) by Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp is creative description and manifesto for a view and a field that conceptualizes computing as a transformational technology within the traditional area of study called the humanities. The book includes a "short guide" that defines digital humanities as "an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the primary medium" for the production and dissemination of knowledge. The book, about the size of many children's picture books, contains many examples of such current research as well as directions for future inquiry.

An open version of this book is also available as a free digital download.

Net Smarties

Net Smart: How to Thrive Online
By Howard Rheingold
The MIT Press

Howard Rheingold has a white moustache. He dresses like the prototype of an aging hippie, but he’s been involved in personal computer theory and practice for 30 years. His social network experience goes back to one of the earliest example, San Francisco’s legendary The Well. Younger readers may know him as the author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. So he’s positioned to speak to several generations on “how to thrive online,” including boomers.

  But this is not a simple how-to book, full of bullet points and illustrations (though it does include some cartoons reminiscent of R. Crumb.) Rheingold writes about how to use the net “mindfully,” which includes critically. Two of his five web literacies (along with attention, participation and collaboration) are net smarts and crap detection. Still, his stance is mainly positive on the benefits and the social change inherent in what he calls the shift from group to network.

  His approach is historical as well as theoretical, philosophical and practical. He pays attention to how adventures in cyberspace change individuals as well as society, and he considers several sides of those questions. He can be acerbic as well as inspirational.

  One of his main assertions is that “the emerging digital divide is between those who know how to use social media for individual advantage and collective action, and those who do not.” Originally the “digital divide” meant the distance between the individuals and communities who could financially afford to fully participate in cyberspace and those who couldn’t. That divide still exists, especially as full participation seems to require frequent new purchases of the latest devices.

  The author’s personal experience—as well as from his students and children—provides rare perspective on cyberspace. This is also a kind of guidebook to future practice, as Rheingold emphasizes the ethics of good networking and social collaboration. So part of his advice, in addition to how to manage information overload and survive on Facebook, is how to be a good participator and network citizen. Plus his emphasis on the skills of attention and critical thinking are useful beyond cyberspace.

    The book is pretty clearly written but it’s not a fast read because there is at least one interesting idea on every page, and depending on individual net experience, a number of challenging topics. It’s also meant to be read beginning to end, which is not exactly the Internet way. It’s about 250 pages of text plus lots of notes and a mediocre index, but what’s missing is a sorely needed glossary of terms as they are used in the book. Overall it’s that paradox of the instant-obsolescence computer age: a keeper.
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There are a few other books about these technologies and the real world for the computer literate on your shopping list this year.  Computing: A Concise History by Paul E. Ceruzzi (MIT) is exactly that: a clearly written history of computing, complete with names and places--and this one does have a glossary.  At 150 plus pages it's very handy, but still a solid and serious work.

Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age by Steven Johnson (Riverhead Books) is breezily written, with a point of view that's basically similar to Rheingold's, but of course it's a different book, with different perspectives, examples and elaborations. 

The Technology of Nonviolence: Social Media and Violence Prevention by Joseph G. Bock (MIT Press) is even more specific.  It is cutting-edge and global, with chapters on Countering Ethnoreligious Violence in Sri Lanka, Interrupting Gang Violence in Chicago and Crowdsourcing during Post-election Violence in Kenya.  It begins with theoretical frameworks and ends with evaluations and recommendations.  This is a thoughtful, sometimes provocative but well-presented and serious work, especially for those grappling with such issues in government, NGOs and even the corporate world, and for students interested in these fields. 
 

Bring Me the Head of Philip K. Dick

How to Build An Android: The True Story of Philip K. Dick’s Robotic Resurrection
by David F. Dufty
Henry Holt

Blade Runner, a film that flopped when it was released in 1982, has since become legendary. It was made from a novel by Philip K. Dick (as were at least nine other movies, including Spielberg’s Minority Report and Arnold’s Total Recall.)  A highly productive California-based science fiction writer from the 1950s until his death in 1982, he inspired generations of other writers, notably fellow West Coasters William Gibson, Ursula Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson.  He still casts quite a shadow.  A hefty volume of his theories and observations (Exegesis) has recently been published, and the New York Times just ran a long 3-part series on Dick as a "sci-fi philosopher."

  As in Blade Runner, many of Dick’s stories involved androids and “replicants,” and the resulting confusions of identification and identity. This as well as other themes he explored made him a particular favorite among the sci-fi minded in computer, robotics and artificial intelligence fields. One of those was David Hanson, who was startling people with his android-ready heads with lifelike skin that internal motors could shape into realistic facial expressions. Another was Andrew Olney, who was programming robots capable of having realistic conversations as learning aids.

When they met in 2004, the idea to create a Philip K. Dick android was born. In a year, it was a reality. But even though a university lab and the FedEx Institute of Technology in Memphis became involved (the head of which one Halloween conducted his meetings in a Star Trek officer’s uniform)   this complex project was mostly accomplished with very little money by Hanson and Olney, motivated by the technical challenges, the possibilities they imagined, and the kick of recreating Philip K. Dick.

  Author David F. Dufty, himself a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Memphis lab when this was going on, tells a good story about the ups and downs, ins and outs of the project, which involves a fair amount of goofy mishaps, mostly due to the unforeseen (but easily foreseeable) quirks of mundane reality that androids (and their makers) have yet to master. That part of the story results in a conclusion which makes this almost mythic.

For Philip K. Dick was also famous for writing about conspiracies, and for believing they existed in the real world. (Then again, Watergate revelations in the 70s revealed that the government really had been spying on people like him.) So the threads of the story come together in one stranger than fiction event: on a flight to San Francisco for a demonstration at Google headquarters, his android head was left behind in an overhead bin.  Though an airline employee reported it found and on its way to its owner, it never arrived.  The android head of Philip K. Dick was never seen again.

  The geek-oriented or simply tech-curious will enjoy the descriptions of the innovative work that went into the project. With minimal jargon, Dufty makes the tech as well as the personalities part of the story flow, an admirable example for a growing genre covering a dominating industry: adventures in Tech World. He ably integrates Philip K. Dick’s biography and major works into the story, which makes it unique. The story itself reveals the classic relationship of sci-fi and new tech, as well as suggesting how surprisingly far towards the androids of fiction current technology is taking us. In focusing on Hanson (basically a sculptor and a hardware tinkerer) and Olney (a software guy) he chronicles another relationship of art and science.

  The book itself could have used more and better photos and illustrations, but otherwise it’s a fascinating account that transcends its specific subject.

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine
by Peter Lunenfeld
The MIT Press

What Marshall McLuhan did in analyzing the meaning of 1960s media, Peter Lunenfeld does for the electronic media of 2011—chiefly the computer and the Internet. Like McLuhan, he coins or adapts catchy new expressions for his concepts, like “unimodernism,” “unfinish,” “web n.0,” “info-triage,” “bespoke futures.” He also develops his ideas in cultural and historical context as McLuhan did. Lunenfeld teaches in the Design/Media Arts department at UCLA, but he has a degree in history from Columbia, and his feeling for history is one element that distinguishes this book from other computer-era analyses. (That said, Lunenfeld would probably hate this comparison with McLuhan, as he pretty much dismisses him.)

For Lunenfeld, the passive consumption of corporate-controlled junk food television has led to “cultural diabetes,” and the Internet is rapidly copying that model. But downloading information and entertainment is only half of the computer’s capability: there is also the exercise of creation and uploading. The war is between the corporate absorption of capabilities to provide consumer content versus individuals and sites that create their own content, share files and produce a culture of participation.

“When a new medium explodes on the scene, we have to find ways of responding to the demands on our time and attention,” he writes. For individuals, the computer becomes a healthy culture machine when we engage in both “mindful downloading” and “meaningful uploading.” But these activities can also benefit society, especially in the collaborative creation of “bespoke futures” (“bespoke” being an antique term for custom-made.)

Lunenfeld challenges web denizens to counter the assumed scenario of an apocalyptic future with fresh visions that come together through an interactive process in a scenario of a desirable future worth trying to achieve. “I am not talking about a singularity of utopian vision but instead a networked plurality of vision—a plutopia, as I call it—better suited to this century, this millennium.” If nothing else, he sees value in constructive dreaming beyond our fear-based Official Future.

The practical challenge is “to create a social media that goes beyond sociability into the realms of the useful.” If something like that doesn’t happen the war will be lost, as it has been with television.

Such a summary doesn’t do these concepts or their presentation justice, but this is generally the terrain. The Internet and computer biz history alone is fascinating, especially in sophisticated contexts like modernism and Bomb Culture.This is a relatively short, deftly written and attractively published book that folds relevant historical and personal anecdotes and contexts into the presentation of these intriguing, well-considered and subtle ideas. Applying the techniques of open-source software developers to attacking poverty and countering “fundamentalist death cults,” for example, sure seems worth trying. I haven’t come across a better book on this general topic, or a potentially more influential one.

While Beyond Boundaries (reviewed below) is essentially a brief for the research and potential of a new technology, these three books are outside analyses of the nature, uses and future of new and on-the-horizon technologies by people who know these technologies well. 

The Techno-Human Condition by Braden R. Allensby and Daniel Sarewitz (MIT Press) examines the many aspects of technological enhancements to human beings.  The authors nudge the less knowledgeable into realizing that these technologies are underway and are in a sense just the latest in a long line of enhancements.  But they also aim to restrain the overenthusiastic who are thoughtless of consequences, counselling a bit more humility.

This is a sophisticated examination of the issues and assumptions that applies to areas beyond these technologies, to an approach to technological change--or even other sources of change-- and future ramifications in general.  The section on war ("Killer Aps") is chilling. There's jargon and technical language to navigate, with lots of long paragraphs, but the process is helped by wit ("In short, we are now back in the comfort zone of ambivalence, ambiguity, and mud wrestling") and a balanced skepticism.  The book itself is handy to hold and carry--always a plus when reading about an alien world that is rapidly becoming our own.

Technological Nature: Adaptations and the Future of Human Life by Peter H. Kahn, Jr. (MIT Press) looks at the psychological effects of experiencing nature second-hand through technology.  It's got case studies, statistics and analysis, with the author's summaries and recommendations.  These occasionally highlight the absurdity of technological nature, as when he suggests that instead of creating simulated views of nature in offices and hospitals, it might make more sense to create views of actual nature.

Some of the examples of how far technological nature has gone may well be surprising, though the prescriptions are not.  The broader and deeper work on these subjects (particularly children and nature) by human ecologist Paul Shepard and others is bearing some fruit in studies like those described here.

Sentient City: ubiquitous computing, architecture and the future of urban space (MIT Press) is a collection of articles and studies by various authors, edited by Mark Shepard, that stems from a 2009 exhibit at New York's Urban Center.  The topic is certainly topical, as information technologies are embedded in the everyday street, often invisibly, with a plethora of often hidden sources, intentions and effects.

Some of the chapters describes projects and studies, while others offer analysis and context, including historical context.  The vocabulary is often pretty dense for the general reader and no sustained examination is possible in a collection from various authors, but this volume can serve the non-specialist as an often provocative introduction to the technologies and issues involved.  And with technologies that enable a park bench to eject someone who oversits his welcome, or that can create an entire city of linked workers (or data-slaves), these issues are pertinent.  Plus the projects themselves can be witty.

Beyond Boundaries: The New Neuroscience of Connecting Brains With Machines—And How It Will Change Our Lives

by Miguel Nicolellis
Times Books

The results of his research on brain-machine interfaces (BMI) has made Miguel Nicolellis a famous scientist, even capturing the attention of Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. This book describes his experiments, culminating in the monkey with electrodes implanted in his brain who played video games or controlled a distant robot just by thinking.

Nicolellis is not shy in predicting future applications—and neither is anyone else. Besides hopes for victims of various diseases, disorders and accidents, he asks us to “imagine living in a world where people use their computers, drive their cars, and communicate with one another simply by thinking.” Or even “touch the surface of a different planet” or “download the thoughts of one of your forefathers” to create a Holodeck encounter in your head.

These resemble the visions of adherents of different and perhaps competing research, into brain-computer interfaces (BCI.) The great weakness of this book is Nicolellis’ refusal to consider that any of this is creepy, or that it would ever be used for nefarious purposes with catastrophic results.

But then, that’s what we have science fiction writers for—to imagine the unforeseen consequences when real people are involved. Already his exoskeleton suit to enable paraplegics to walk looks a lot like Robocop. As he notes, it’s this kind of research that inspired The Matrix and Avatar, though he rejects such dour scenarios without saying why. Especially considering that the Pentagon is already experimenting with BCI.

Nor does Nicolellis consider that a future with the economics necessary to support all of this is getting less likely every day. Such tunnel vision exposes another continuing danger—that we think we know enough to assume everything in the psyche is a matter of manipulating neurons.

Still, one can hope for cooler and more cautious heads with more balanced evaluations, since the research itself clearly has potential. Besides, these speculations make up a very small part of the book. Much of it is a brief for the anti-reductionist view of neurons not as single function push-buttons but as part of a neuronal orchestra—a musical metaphor which he uses in various ways throughout, generally to good effect. It’s also clearly a metaphor, after the supposedly literal explanations of the brain as the current dominant technology, depending on the century: clockworks, steam engine, telephone exchange or computer.

Perhaps the most intriguing hypothesis being tested is that the brain continuously creates models of the body’s interactions with the world, including imagining future possibilities and rehearsing simulations.  Thus the brain is always rehearsing the future, even at the neuronal level.

Except for some egregious overwriting (especially early on) and often endearing awkwardness, these chapters and the accounts of the experiments are often absorbing and engaging. Meshing the science with personal anecdotes and philosophical observations seems to have become standard in books by brain scientists, but here as is often the case they add to both understanding and reading pleasure for the non-specialist.

Gift Books 2010
The Best Technology Writing 2010
Edited by Julian Dibbell
Yale University Press

Once again, this annual Yale Press selection provides informative, timely, thought-provoking and well-written pieces on manifestations of new technologies. The emphasis is less on the technologies themselves that the impact and meaning, applied not only to contemporary life but to our understanding of larger matters such as biological evolution and the human brain.

The topics include those aspects of the Internet that are taking the biggest slice out of life: Facebook, Twitter, Google, texting etc. but there are a few passes at other technologies, like Burkhard Bilger's piece on the attempts to create the perfect stove--cheap enough for the extremely poor, but also efficient, healthy (the leading killer of children in the world is pneumonia, caused by toxic smoke) and low carbon.

There are very few real clinkers--though including elder bloviator Kevin Kelly may have been necessary, perhaps not at this length. On the other end, Mark Bowden's crime reporting hit an important issue, but did it need more than 30 pages? The best pieces, like Bilger's, are a combination of reporting and thoughtful analysis. Vanessa Grigoriadis begins with an account of Facebook's problems with privacy but moves quickly into a nuanced consideration of the Facebook and social networking phenomenon as a whole. Tad Friend's profile of Elon Musks, the epic-scale visionary entrepreneur (Paypal, SpaceX, SolarCity) whose name could have emerged from a Thomas Pynchon novel, is a prime example of a piece you want to have in a book you can grab from your bookshelf.

Then there are the pieces you can both admire and argue with, like Sam Anderson's "In Defense of Distraction," which makes an undeniably good point (that we need both focus and dreaming) which depends somewhat on particular definitions of attention and distraction, while ignoring other important perils of distraction. But it's got interesting reporting and nuanced discussion along the way.

This is an excellent collection, and an excellent example of why we still need good writing and good reading. But Dibbell makes a salient point in his introduction when he points out that every piece but one comes from the "traditional print media--and perhaps more than ever in the bastions of that tradition upon which the best practitioners of long-form journalism now converge, like polar bears on a shrinking ice floe."

An apt metaphor, since the fetish and frenzy for Internet media are physically destroying the species known as print newspapers, magazines and books. Why is it that this quality of writing and thinking isn't found on the billion blogs, tweets and texts searing cyberspace? Well, except on my blogs. Because writers have to eat and finance a life, and it takes a life to do this work well. It also costs to do the research. Moreover, this is particular work, enabled by the better newspapers, magazines and book publishers. Among the last animals to be paid to arrange words are various species of academics, but due to different priorities and skills, very few produce prose that ordinary intelligent readers care to read.

So far the Internet and the riches it supposedly generates has failed to provide either stable platforms or adequate payment, as evidenced by the example in this volume of the slovenly opportunism of at least one Internet media company that Daniel Roth writes about, and notwithstanding Clay Shirky's myopic analysis of print media.

So grab a good book while you can--this one, for instance. It's accessible to anybody with a vocabulary, technical degrees not required. However, in the short reviews that follow on the page, there are some other possibilities for earnest and especially academic technophiliacs... And don't forget Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia.

Gift Books 2010
Tech Books in Brief

Still looking for that last smart book gift for your favorite technowizard or tech-savvy student of contemporary culture and the future? Here are a few selected fall releases from the Shangri-la of techdom, MIT Press.

Texture: Human Expression in the Age of Communication Overload by Richard H.R. Harper (MIT) takes a social science approach to its stated topic, using the metaphors of touch and texture to emphasize the human benefits. He finds that despite the complexities and disadvantages of being inundated with emails, texts and tweets, “to suggest that people communicate too much is like saying that people are bound to each other in too many ways...” Well, maybe, but I wonder if this doesn’t beg the question.

While Harper’s book is billed as an extended personal essay, Designing Media by Bill Moggridge (MIT)looks at the information revolution through interviews (including Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Craiglist’s Craig Newmark but also artists, musicians, magazine and book editors, designers, venture capitalists, video and filmmakers, political media consultant etc.) with photos throughout and a DVD tucked in the back. There is a surprising sense of immediacy in the interviews, and improvisation in the organization of the book (though that might be deceptive.) Apart from the content, it looks and feels like a textbook. There’s bound to be insights for lots of different people in this wide range of interviews, and reference material for those who start with the DVD.

Voice: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media, edited by Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson and Theo van Leeuwen (MIT) is a different sort of anthology: gathering voices on the various implications of voice, examining insights from the arts (dance, video and sound art) as well as video games and other technologies. There’s a chapter (by Martin Thomas) on the damage of written language to aboriginal spoken language, and the role of recording technology in documenting and reviving oral tradition. These essays vary from requiring sophisticated attention to knowing various academic and technical languages. Though some essays treat “voice” as expressed in ways other than in sound, voice is especially interesting because sound is often overlooked in what we choose to call our visual culture. There's also a bias against sound as an element of culture in the past because until recently it couldn't be preserved, and so our sense of the past is warped by a dependence on artifacts that preserve only visual and tactile impressions.

Looking towards the technological future, a number of books have been published recently—or soon will be—on the perils and opportunities of combinations of flesh and technological enhancements, of human and machine. How to Catch A Robot Rat: When Biology Inspires Innovation by Agnes Guillot and Jean-Arcady Meyer (MIT) looks at some 25 years of research—some that looks at biological creatures to help design robots, and some that obtain insights on biology by examining what’s worked and hasn’t in designing robots. Though social, cultural and philosophical insights gleaned come bubbling out of the authors’ explanations of this research, the emphasis is technical.

With each year the convergence comes closer—and where that’s headed is what Nicholas Agar worries about in Humanity’s End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement (MIT). The question is not necessarily whether humans will be replaced by robots in the outside world, but from inside themselves. Agar writes not just about machine technology but chemical and biological enhancements to allow humans to do more, be a great deal smarter, and live very much longer. Agar is engaged and tries hard to be engaging. He organizes arguments made elsewhere (about AI for example) as well as making his own. It’s a thought-provoking web of views on these subjects, which prompt questions on what it means to be human anyway. But as a practical matter, I am deeply skeptical that in view of the extreme economic, social and cultural challenges of the Climate Crisis and other ecological causes, there will be enough in the way of resources to go down these roads very far. Still, I’m sure there will be those among the extremely rich who will try.

Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia
by Joseph Michael Reagle Jr.
The MIT Press

A book and especially a fictionalized feature film on the founding of Facebook got a lot of buzz recently, predictably because for all its innovation and surprising success, it’s just the same old story of the fight for love and glory and money. The Internet is increasingly an advertising medium, clotted and cratered with the frenzy for profits. The true exception is the innovative success of a collaborative effort that has become as indispensable a feature of the Internet as Googling or YouTube: the prime online reference work called Wikipedia.

This book is not meant to be biography or reportage, but contemporary ethnography or study of a culture. But the story it tells is compelling anyway: in an Internet culture more and more dominated by “fractious narcissism,” “ Wikipedia culture encourages contributors to treat and think of others well.” Yeah, that’ll work. But mostly it does.

Founder Jimmy Wales gets a chapter (“The Benevolent Dictator”) but only after Reagle starts honing in on the nub: ”The Challenges of Consensus.” Reagle approaches it all in a large context, going back for example to historical dreams of collaborative knowledge bases, like H.G. Wells’ World Brain, as well as ethics and methods of collaboration of the Quakers, for instance. But mostly it’s an Internet historical context, from the early days when the idea of free information resulted in such institutions as open source code and the Creative Commons.

Wikipedia has its critics, including the transparently political who demonize anything that doesn’t play predatory capitalism. Reagle describes ongoing debates over the accuracy of user-supplied information, trying to separate it out from professional sour grapes. So he gets at both of the interesting questions: how can this possibly work? And, is it any good really? He begins and ends the book considering conflict (which sooner or later results in people calling each other Nazis.) He concludes that while not immune to “pettiness, idiocy and vulgarity,” “What Wikipedia collaborative culture does...is call upon the better angels of our nature,” through emphasizing and reinforcing good faith ethics, and improvising institutional methods for encouraging them, as well as insuring the integrity of what’s published online.

Reagle writes without much jargon, and although it requires more than casual interest in Internet or hacker culture, it’s clear enough for open access. What this book does well is describe how Wikipedia works and what issues have arisen. It’s short on drama and personality, and so it’s probably destined to be a source document if a publisher is ever convinced that Wikipedia is sexy enough to merit a more narrative-driven treatment. Since that seems unlikely, this may remain the best opportunity for learning about this remarkable project.

When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America
by David E. Nye
MIT Press

We live in a world where time and space have been eliminated, where millions of people increasingly live in virtual worlds, and there’s no turning back. Right, and the real estate bubble will never burst and the stock market never goes down.

The problem with our electronic future is that it all depends on electricity, while the U.S. grid is aging and vulnerable, no new capacity is being added, and dominant energy sources are dwindling and/or terminally toxic. Still there seems to be this sense that the growth of the Internet is cost-free. However, the New Yorker quotes a high-powered engineer that the Internet probably uses twice the energy as air travel, and that use is growing faster than anything else. A few years ago conservative futurist George Gilder predicted that Internet computing would soon require as much power as the entire U.S. economy did in 2001.

David E. Nye has written a wide-ranging and very readable book that’s basically about how electricity became a foundation of modern society, as revealed especially in what happens when it goes off. There’s the social dimension (the Great Northeastern blackout of 1965 that in New York led to unexpected friendliness, and a similar blackout in 1977 that led to looting), and the technical and economic dimensions. Those who remember the Enron-rigged rolling blackouts of the 90s in CA will get more context along with a return of rising blood pressure.

But accompanying the thought-provoking entertainment, there are warnings about the current U.S. grid’s much-ignored problems of capacity and vulnerability. Perhaps surprisingly, Nye suggests that terrorism is a less of threat than complacency (because power disruptions usually get fixed before people panic.) Greater energy efficiency and decentralization, especially with green technologies, aren’t just nice goals—they’re vital if the power is going to keep flowing. The problems are less technological, he writes, than political and economic. “The problem is not a lack of means but a lack of political will.”

Blackouts remind us what we don’t have when we don’t have electricity. Nye quotes an architect that without it “there is no compression of time and space anymore,” and “one cannot hide behind a wireless phone nor dive yourself into the Internet.”

Apropos of a previous review (of another book from the academic press), I noted with some amusement that Nye felt it necessary to write, somewhat defensively, in his introduction: “Each theory is briefly introduced as the story moves between technical, social, political, and cultural history. Specialists often want theory to be highly visible, like scaffolding covering a building. I prefer to build it unobtrusively into the argument...” In other words, he’s apologizing for using such common tools as narrative and clear, standard English so this book is accessible and even enjoyable for those outside the brotherhood of Theory. The result is a book for both energy techies and the rest of us. Though a bit diffuse, its emphasis on narrative makes it a provocative pleasure.

Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear
By Steve Goodman
The MIT Press 270 Pages

The deliberate use of sound as a weapon, as well as the noise pollution that is already a pervasive, unacknowledged and damaging aggression—this is a subject that cries out for a well-researched and trenchant book. The title and subtitle of this book suggest such a treatment, but the book itself defies such expectations.

It is instead an academic book of a particular kind, as evidenced by the wildly disparate topics it examines, and especially its prose. For example: “ By constructing this method as a nonrepresentational ontology of vibrational force, and thus the rhythmic nexus of body, technology, and sonic process, some latent affective tendencies of contemporary urban cultures in the early-twenty-first century can be made manifest.”

I rest my case. It may be so, as literary scholar Robert D. Richardson writes, that “we can follow an argument and recognize its strength only by its congruence with our own mental processes.” In any case, even if academic semiotic jargon has trickled down to more of the reading public, I still doubt that the general reader is up to hacking through such thickets of prose, which can be said to be English only in that no other known languages would acknowledge them. Whatever penetrating points this book makes remain the kind of secrets the priesthood of Theory apparently likes to keep to itself.

University presses are publishing more serious books for general readers, as trade publishers increasingly abandon this enterprise. But university presses still publish books that are of primary interest to academics—and are written that way. No reason that they shouldn’t, but attempting to sell a few more copies of academic books by giving them disingenuous titles is a temptation it might be better to resist.

Simulation and Its Discontents by Sherry Turkle is one of two excellent books on technology that should make fine gifts for the tech-minded reader. Reviewed in post below.

Tech Gift Book # 1
Simulation and Its Discontents
by Sherry Turkle
The MIT Press 217 pages

Daily life is being reshaped so rapidly and extensively by quickly pervasive new technologies that experienced perspective is correspondingly crucial. With The Second Self in 1984, Sherry Turkle established herself as a trenchant observer and analyst of the personal computer’s effects on people, and perhaps more importantly, as a deft writer on the subject. In this new book, she examines how professionals in several fields interact with computer simulation, suggesting the effects on all our lives. For as we’ve seen with cell phones and related applications, evaluating their effects is an afterthought at best. “The more powerful our tools become,” she writes, “the harder it is to imagine the world without them.”

Turkle tips her psychology background with the title, a nod to Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. She quotes architect Louis Kahn’s question—“what does a brick want?” (with its echo of Freud’s “What do women want?”) and adapts it to all the fields she studies, and to focus the overall question: what does simulation want? And what do we want?

As a new faculty member at MIT in the 1980s, Turkle surveyed student and faculty reactions to the increasing use of computers in academic and professional settings. Twenty years later (finishing in 2005), for another ethnographic study she went back to the architects, engineers, biologists, chemists and physicists in the same firms and departments. In this book, she presents findings from both studies, highlighting their contrasts but also the developing themes.

The central theme is the most obvious and most profound: the worry over losing a sense of reality while being seduced by simulations. It was a worry at MIT as early as the first pocket calculators: without the visual reference of slide rules, students were making what seemed like small mistakes—a single digit-- but they were huge errors in order of magnitude. Similarly, simulations hide their own errors. The first simulations of crystals growing were mesmerizing, and also wrong. Simulations express biases in their code, their structure: an early game called Sim City (players planned and built a city) embedded economic theories associated with Milton Friedman, so that taxes for social purposes were always bad.

In the 1980s, Turkle found faculty insisting that students learn the programming to understand the assumptions of the simulations they used. By 2005, few were doing so. A generation has grown up with computer simulations, and the fear is that they can no longer detect errors because they have little experience with the reality being simulated. (Interestingly, Turkle found cases in which older faculty were pushing simulation programs but being resisted by younger students, who wanted more hands-on experience.)

Architects find that simulated designs look so “finished” that it's hard to change them, even though they are preliminary. Builders weren’t checking computer designs, assuming they were correct. But the basic fact of programming still pertains: garbage in, garbage out. Computers can be wrong, based on wrong assumptions and biases, and following programming steps that don’t end up reflecting reality (which is usually more complex.)

Turkle’s study is 100 pages of this book. The rest is comprised of case studies, including two that are especially fascinating: William Clancey’s study of NASA scientists and their relationships to the Mars rovers, and Stefan Helmreich’s description of high tech deep ocean explorers, about to be made obsolete by technology that doesn’t require human presence.