“Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget has one of the more sobering prefaces to be found in recent books. ‘It’s early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons’, it begins. The words will be ‘minced into anatomized search engine keywords’, then ‘copied millions of times by some algorithm somewhere designed to send an advertisement’, and then, in a final insult, ‘scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers’ …” (more)
[Michael Agger, Slate, 3 January]