This book has *huge* amounts of white space, and although it came to me highly recommended, over the course of reading every word I rated it at three stars–not nearly as interesting as, to take one book I especially liked, SNOWCRASH.However, I have raised it to 4 stars because of the gems, such as the loss of the future on page 57, good description of digital watermarking, the enormous distrust of false advertising and false impressions leading to false relations (p 85), the final denouncement of the loss of time and human intimary (p. 302-303), and–overall–the portrayal of web-life, the sympathetic portrayal of Usenet-type groups and their members, the idea of cool ideas and “cool hunter”, and the overall representation of mobile information and its vulnerabilities to interception.
Having said all that, I found this to be very light reading, half the text a book of this sort might have warranted, and on balance, disappointing.
