Douglas Rushkoff’s latest salvo on complacent media culture, set in 2008, features Jamie Cohen, a young hacker who, like the biblical Joseph, suffers betrayal and then penance before joining forces with a venture capitalist determined to turn everyone into mindless consumers.
Meanwhile, Jamie’s former pals have developed a way to kill the Web’s – and the stock market’s – profit-making capacities. A dazzling satire of 1990s dot-com mania, this McLuhanesque cultural critique establishes a new publishing precedent: it is the first “open-source” ebook, annotated by online readers.
