as the author of this book, i encourage readers to read it and not the one preceding "review" by "david a."
the review fails in any way even to acknowledge the book's main theses and its central arguments. it duplicates content from a blog posting (which may be by the same author) that makes even bolder false claims, such as that the book lacks references (despite being full of quotations indicated by page number directly from works listed in the bibliography)
even in the review, actual facts are referred to as "factual errors." For example, Voltaire is obviously part of the critical counter-Enlightenment within Enlightenment itself (not the later Germany-based Counter-Enlightenment, but this movement is never mentioned in the book), and this is what the book claims: that is to say that Candide appears to mock Leibnizian claims. I take both the Voltairian "critical rationalist" position and the Leibnizian "positive rationalist" position (both of these are caricatures for the sake of argument) to be part of Enlightenment, and this is clear in the book, and widely acknowledged by all scholars of the Enlightenment and obvious from Voltaire's own writings, so calling it out as a "factual error" is quite egregious.
I also don't think Leibniz preceded Descartes, etc.
No citation is provided for the comment that Frege and Russell are on opposite sides; I do not see the claim in the book. Still, politically, Russell and Frege could not have been more opposed. Their logical projects were closely aligned.
the review claims not to understand the reasons for my discussion of Object-Oriented Programming, but whether he agrees with them or not, detailed reasons are provided.
A main argument of the book (again, this review does not even attempt to list these) is that computers are not "pre-inoculated" against use by "bad" power. That is, if "computers empower users," that does not lead directly to "computers empower good users and (for some unstated reason) empower bad users less." Thus pointing out the covert (and now well-established) use of (for that time) advanced computing power to help perpetrate the Holocaust, whatever you think of it, is not "guilt by association." it is the use of computers to do bad stuff. from their inception. which is one of the main points the book is trying to make. that does not mean that computers don't also do good stuff. the failure to acknowledge both of these among computational rhetoricians is fairly remarkable: "if you say they do bad things, you must mean they don't do good things!"
finally, the book is not pessimistic and goes out of its way to say so. computers can be used for both good and evil. the relentless and almost exclusive focus on what computers are good for--especially within the US academy, which is the book's main context, as this reviewer fails to mention--risks depriving society of its own vital critical function, which is necessary (in my opinion) as part of any civil/democratic society. That happens to be the same function I claim Voltaire (and other critical Enlightenment figures like Swift) performed.
computers can even be used by anti-knowledge libertarians to try to completely deceive amazon readers
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