Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob

by Lee Siegel
Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob
book data
76 ratings, 3.11 average rating, 34 reviews (more data...)
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published
January 22nd 2008 by Spiegel & Grau

binding
Hardcover, 192 pages

isbn
0385522657    (isbn13: 9780385522656)

description

From the author hailed by the New York Times Book Review for his “drive-by brilliance” and dubbed by the New York Times Magazine as “one of the countr

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Worth a skim, some interesting commentary 1 7 03/11/2008 02:53PM  

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womanimal
03/12/08
womanimal rated it: 1 of 5 stars

Read in March, 2008
Despite its compelling title and slew of vehement arguments, Against the Machine doesn’t really deliver. Lee Siegel, a prolific author and cultural critic, adopts the premise that all Internet interactions, whether via online marketplaces or social networking sites, equate to commercial transactions. He argues that the Internet extends capitalism into our most intimate moments, reducing all participants to “prosumers” whose leisure time is dominated by the continuous urge to create and con...more
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Tom
03/01/08
Tom rated it: 1 of 5 stars

Read in April, 2008
recommends it for: nobody
Boring neo-luddite polemic. There are a few interesting ideas here, but nothing is well researched if researched at all. Instead of being thoughtfully critical of (what Siegel calls) the "Internet Boosters", he is instead malicious and insulting - with the result that he comes off more as a spoiled child than a cultural critic. There is so much in this book ranging from the ill-thought-out to the just-plain-wrong that I could have written volumes in response, but in the end I felt li...more
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R.John
02/10/08
R.John rated it: 2 of 5 stars

bookshelves: nonfiction
Read in February, 2008
recommends it for: Readers 2.0
The polemic that the internet equals commerce is hardly new, nor are the glances at examples Siegel trots out. His points, all important and valid, are tainted by their own obviousness. Where the critique could have gone deeper, he instead, seems poised to jump feet first into the superficiality of the raging debate. Instead of countering the internet cheerleaders with something philosophically devastating, he is content to offer a tongue lashing - ultimately falling prey to all the same pratfal...more
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Chris
03/11/09
Chris rated it: 4 of 5 stars

Siegel mounts a bracing and effective critique of the Internet, web culture and its attendant effects (which he sees as largely negative) on our popular culture and democracy. In many respects, Siegel's argument updates and extends the critique of "market populism" developed by Thomas Frank and other writers associated with the political/cultural journal The Baffler in the 1990s, a time in which high-flying dot.com utopians appropriated the language of democracy, liberation, and revolu...more
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Charles
01/28/08
Charles rated it: 3 of 5 stars

bookshelves: currently-reading
I read the New York Times review and was intrigued -- a critic looking at the "dark side" of the Internet and the blogosphere -- I'm in the middle of it, and agreeing mostly, but also wishing he'd make the points stronger. I think the Internet is a wonderful technology, but not ever one can use it well -- like not every one is a good driver. The car is good technology, but it can also kill in the wrong hands. I think I'm a Luddite in some respects. More anon.
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Rashaan
04/05/09
Rashaan rated it: 3 of 5 stars

Lee Siegel raises excellent critical theories about our latest and greatest tool, though much of the text seems to veer into personal rant. Some of his finer points include:
Like the car, the Internet has been made out to be a miracle of social and personal transformation when it is really a marvel of convenience--and in this case of the Internet, a marvel of convenience that has caused a social and personal upheaval. As with the car, the highly arbitrary way in which the Internet has evo
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Justin
01/03/09
Justin rated it: 3 of 5 stars

Read in January, 2009
Most reviews of this book sound like people had an idea of what the book was going to be about before reading it, and kept it up until they read it. And then they made the same judgments afterward.

He's not as old-man-get-off-my-lawn as people claim him to be. He's a bit grumpy, but I think his disdain for the worthless tripe on the net (and on most media, for that matter) is justified. He makes a decent case for it.

He is a bit of a snob, but it'd be hard to write this book wi...more
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S
10/06/08
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Martin
08/18/08
Martin rated it: 2 of 5 stars

Read in September, 2008
After reading an awful lot lately about the economic and cultural significance of life in the digital age (boosterism), I picked this little diddy up at the library recently in an attempt to get an opposing viewpoint. I mean, Lee Siegel IS one of the most important cultural critics in American today...it says so right there on the dust jacket!

I cannot speak to Mr Sigel's significance in the realm of cultural criticism - I'm not sure if I have ever run across (though I probably have ...more
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Scot
04/01/08
Scot rated it: 3 of 5 stars

A prophet, crying in the wilderness, warns us of the transvaluation of human experience, focus on self, and loss of knowledge (understanding as opposed to available information) occuring as a result of the burgeoning of the Internet, specifically the much-lauded Web 2.0 revolution. This piece is at sometimes a sermon, at others an eloquent reflective essay, and still at others a lament, with bristling anger barely concealed. Evidence is often scanty, but I am drawn to the important reflexive p...more
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Sophia
02/28/08
Sophia rated it: 2 of 5 stars

bookshelves: 2008, borrowed, nonfiction
Read in March, 2008
I was intrigued by this book when the author was interviewed on the Daily Show because, after almost ten years of very extensive involvement in internet communities, I've started to become uneasy not so much with the commercialization of the media but of the anonymity he speaks about. I find, on the whole, that people are willing to say appalling things when they don't have to attach their own names to it, especially when they don't have to respond in a real-time, face to face confrontation but ...more
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Douglas
03/27/09
Douglas rated it: 1 of 5 stars

I'm cursed at the moment. This book tosses out phrases like "hermetic" and "couched in the rational and rationalizing..."

The point of the book is that technology drives us to our mob behavior. Not like this point hasn't been made for centuries (anyone read the Edmund Burke book I liked?), and the notion that changing social mores result from process & technological changes (anyone read Plato's Republic).

But rarely has so little been said with so many w...more
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Jricket
06/19/09
Jricket rated it: 2 of 5 stars

Read in June, 2009
Good title; mediocre book. Many quotes about what other famous & semi-famous people have thought about the Internet and computers, but no real original thoughts and no main theme spelling out what he thinks about the subject or where he thinks it's all taking us. I didn't finish it because I reached a point where I felt there were better things to do with my time. Maybe someone who is relatively new to the web and technology would appreciate it more.
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Molly
12/01/08
Molly rated it: 3 of 5 stars

Read in December, 2008
recommends it for: people who question the popularity of things like YouTube and American Idol
Siegel is a little too reactionary for my taste, and I have to wonder if he's had some problematic personal encounters with Malcolm Gladwell... but those issues aside, it's the sort of extended essay on possible negative effects of the Internet that I've been wanting to read for a long time. He succeeds in his mission, as long as you manage to ignore the occasional bouts of self-indulgent stodginess on Siegel's part.
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Dmitry
01/30/08
Dmitry rated it: 2 of 5 stars

I agree with all the conclusions of the book, but consider its argument fatally flawed. Yes, there's nothing good on the Internet, but Siegel's accusations--it's too commercial, too puerile, too crass, and the writing sucks--doesn't begin to deal with the problem. After all, every one of those charges can equally apply to publishing, comics, TV, theater, music and movies. Theodore Sturgeon said that 90 percent of everything is shit, and he was too generous. The problem with the Internet, is ...more
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Sarah
02/12/08
Sarah rated it: 5 of 5 stars

A great critique of internet culture...what people think is the hallmark of "freedom" and "choice" is really more corporate conformism, packaged in the guise of a revolution. A few great quotes:
"For what this new religion of information has done is pretend that information now has the power of knowledge. In the process, knowledge has been devalued into information."
"It is knowledge that gives us our ethical and historical bearings, and knowledge als...more
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Mia
05/28/08
Mia rated it: 3 of 5 stars

Read in June, 2008
Many excellent points beginning from old questions. Why do we idolize machines and the new? How does a technology change an epistemology? Why (o Karl) have we turned things into fetishes and people into things? And are we suffering from whiplash, just now, having embraced the internet in 10-some years when it took the printing press 300 years to make it from the rooms of scholars to those of readers? Also: what's the dealie with anonymous internet shit talking, stalking, living-through-screens e...more
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Nick
04/21/08
Nick rated it: 4 of 5 stars

Read in April, 2008
It is a shame that the important, true things that Lee Siegel argues in this book are obscured by his all out attack on the Internet's down side which does not recognize that for every rude, self-serving, ill-informed blog there is a reasoned opinion elsewhere on line; for every source of misinformation there is an authoritative source of solid fact; and so on. Siegel can be infuriating, silly or simply wrong, but that should not stop anyone who uses the Internet from reading his book carefully...more
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Leah
06/20/08
Leah rated it: 2 of 5 stars

Read in July, 2008
Ugh, I wish this book was worth it enough to write more here than "soooo lame." Emphasis on the trailing vowels there. Seriously--I was hoping that reading this would give me a better argument to back up why I don't really like most elements of Web 2.0, text messaging, or anything else that I'm supposed to be going wild about. Nope, not here. I think the word that comes to mind when reading this might be "crankypants" or "fuddy-duddy". It almost makes me want t...more
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Nomi
03/12/08
Nomi rated it: 1 of 5 stars

bookshelves: nonfiction
Read in March, 2008
If you're looking to have your mind blown via the nonfiction counterpart to a William Gibson novel don't bother. This author fully embodies the captain obvious persona...(Wait a minute-The internet isn't really healthy and "social"? the internet has redefined commerce/business with its language of laissez faire/independent spiritedness and simultaneous claim to new agey "community building"? Has this author not been exposed to any cultural criticism over the last 10 years?
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