Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website (New York: Crown, 2011), 304 pp., $23.00.
David Leigh and Luke Harding, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), 352 pp., $15.99.
Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), 432 pp., $27.95.
Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (New York: The Penguin Press, 2010), 256 pp., $25.95.
Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
THE UNITED States has always been a nation of technological optimists. From Jefferson to Edison to the 1939 World’s Fair, giddiness over gadgetry is as American as apple pie. Benjamin Franklin refused to patent his inventions in the belief that he was creating public goods. Buckminster Fuller leapt from designing radical new structures like the energy-efficient and easy-to-construct Dymaxion House to the conclusion that “selfishness is unnecessary”—and dismissed it as the product of irrational minds. Surely it is no coincidence that our country has also produced generals who pronounced that wars could be won through the sole use of airpower or central bankers who were convinced that they had vanquished risk through fancy mathematical algorithms. Our faith in engineering has a habit of sliding over into our idealism about society.
