BOOK
$24
Looking for clues about life after Enron? 9/11? Maybe Webvan? You won't find them here. Sure, James Gleick built his rep by wrestling with complexity: His book Chaos made the world safe for the new science of disorder. Genius laid bare the artistry at the heart of the Manhattan Project. Faster freeze-framed Internet time. But apparently the roaring '90s proved more elusive than the Bomb or Bengali typhoons, so What Just Happened won't launch a new understanding of network effects. Instead, this collection of previously published essays provides a time tunnel - part pause for reflection, part greatest hits.
Spanning August 1992 to April 2001, Gleick's book details a decade's obsessions, with lucid reporting and a deft human touch. His 1995 anatomy of the Microsoft monopoly is technically astute and remarkably ahead of the curve. Satiric shorts like "Click OK to Agree" quickly find their mark and neatly skewer the shape of things to come. Unfortunately, as Gleick observes, the present has a way of staying with us. The closing chapters are the only two guilty of relevance; the early dispatches from the electronic wilderness now read like James Fenimore Cooper.
So, why take this stroll through the digital attic? Gleick quotes Stewart Brand: "There has never been a time of such drastic and irretrievable information loss.... We do short-term memory, period." A succinct argument for an information age diary. But what Just Happened really chronicles is the evolution of Gleick's voice. "It's a frontier," he writes of the Net in 1994, "befitting its origins: unruly, impolite, and anarchic. But also democratic." By '96, it's a "sales bazaar as scummy and senseless as any on the face of the planet." Come spring 2000, he's morphed from consumer-netizen into a cognitive dissident lamenting that the catalyst for creativity has become a carburetor for corporate power. At finish, Gleick's biggest mistake is his refusal to let go. The RevolutionTM has been commoditized. Where do you want to go today?
Pantheon: www.pantheonbooks.com.
STREET CRED
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Game On: The Culture and History of Videogames
Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast
Dogtown and Z-Boys
What Just Happened: A Chronicle From the Information Frontier, by James Gleick
Rustboy.com
Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade - Special Edition
ReadMe
Music
Pro Tools Mbox
Blow-Up: Inflatable Art, Architecture, and Design, by Sean Topham
Mister Mosquito
StreamSage
Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web, by David Weinberger
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