What is wrong with technology today? Why does it seem to have turned against us? These are the questions at the heart of a new book by James Williams, a Google strategist who fled to Oxford for a doctorate in philosophy. Williams' answers are persuasive on the point fewer and fewer of us need persuasion about: Something is rotten in our relationship with our “wondrous little machines,” and it's important to find out what.
But there the satisfaction ends. The earnest elegance of Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy, a slim manifesto against technological threats to our freedom of will, can't quite mask what is at first blush a strange imprecision about exactly what is the enemy.
Unfortunately for Williams, and others in the the growing cadre of techies-turned-critics-of-technology, the reality he skirts is that his corrective view is grounded in the same electric-age culture as the economic relationship he hopes to depose. Both Williams' utopia and the dystopia he attacks are fueled by fantasies and illusions that the digital world is busily obsolescing.
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