Jaron Lanier's book, You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto, has ruffled feathers in the US. The book takes a swipe at Web 2.0, accusing it of destroying individuality, destroying creativity and destroying middle-class professions. On the cover of the book are these portentous words:
"It's early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words
will mostly be read by nonpersons-automatons or numb mobs composed of people
who are no longer acting as individuals. The words will be minced into
atomised search-engine keywords within industrial cloud computing facilities
located in remote, often secret locations around the world. The vast fanning
out of the fates of these words will take place almost entirely in the
lifeless world of pure information. Real human eyes will read these words in
only a tiny minority of cases."
