David Bodanis
Big Bad Net
To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism and the Urge to Fix Problems That Don't Exist
By Evgeny Morozov
Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 413pp £20 order from our bookshop
Who Owns the Future?
By Jaron Lanier
Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 359pp £20 order from our bookshop
Whenever a new technology comes along, some people are going to get a little bit too excited. It happened with the telegraph (predicted to usher in global peace), with radio (ditto), with space travel (ditto). Even the miracles of media manipulation that could make Tony Blair look trustworthy were, by some, expected to bring about a permanent reign for New Labour. Wise people rarely fall for such crazes, foolish people never escape them, but in between there’s a curious type of human: those with enough puppy-dog enthusiasm to bound after the latest fashion, but – as time goes on – an ability to raise ever so slightly their awareness of history and see that they’ve been hoodwinked after all. The Internet has been better than any of these other technologies – and almost as potent as early-20th-century Marxism – in bringing forth this naivety play.
Evgeny Morozov is the younger of the Internet apostates reviewed here. He admits, ‘Thinking that you are living through a revolution and hold the key to how it will unfold is, I confess, rather intoxicating … I remember the thrill [between 2005 and 2007] from thinking that the lessons of
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger