Which perhaps accounts for Rushkoff's serioso mood throughout. He's not going to let anyone trick him into falling for something. Though he clearly identifies on a certain level with the Cool Kids, in this sense Rushkoff is a New Simpleton par excellence. He wants people to make choices rationally, based on explicit information and an easily listed set of preferences. For him, warm feelings in fuzzy categories are best left to nonmarket relations--you know, like "family" and "community."
Strangely, Rushkoff pulls back from espousing explicit public policies to deal with the problems, real and imaginary, that he describes. Instead, he draws a vaguely individualist lesson: Basically, "we" are "they," and "without our complicity, they are powerless."
At this point, ironic detachment starts looking pretty good. If we are snookered a hundred ways till Sunday yet remain somehow responsible, mightn't a little snicker be, at least once, the appropriate response?
Coercion is a balanced book in at least one sense: For every real insight, it gives us something utterly ludicrous. Even the best part, the next-to-last chapter on "Virtual Marketing," includes some gasp-inducing statements. Here's one at random: "As anyone who has used an Internet account for a while will tell you, the majority of messages circulating online are the electronic equivalent of junk mail, or what has become known as `Spam.'" I have used several Internet accounts, for more than a few years, and this flies in the face of my experience. Sure, I get quite a few ads at one of my Yahoo! addresses, but unlike Rushkoff--who complains of lacking an easy way to distinguish junk mail from friends' mail--I can identify spam at a glance, and kill it with a few clicks. I read only what interests me, only those messages that have enticed me with an interesting subject line or a familiar e-mail address. Why complain about something so easy to dispose of? A flick of the finger and it's gone. No bulging garbage bag, no trip to the dumpster.
And so I react to this book precisely as it would have us react to a sales pitch. Rushkoff is pushing something, and that something does not seem to be in my interest. Like any good salesman, he tells a good story, and his wares do not wholly lack merit. But he's twisting words and arguments in untrustworthy ways.
My advice, then, is for readers still curious about his book to learn from the masters of the video remote and program for themselves. Check out the chapter on "Virtual Marketing," in which Rushkoff tells the tale of an Internet twisted from its communitarian origins into a commercial monstrosity. Perhaps you will not react as I did (I suspect that Rushkoff has always been a bit off the beam). Perhaps you will not see his progress from eschatological Internet optimist to sour and beleaguered "Technorealist" as a thing of comedy. Perhaps you'll buy what he's selling.
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