Ten years after
My friend David Shenk has recently written two absolutely amazing social history books — one about Alzheimer's disease and one about chess. I don't care if you think you're not interested in the subjects. Check them out. They're thoroughly engrossing.
He's in the process of doing it again, and you're invited to help him out.
But ten years ago, David wrote a different kind of book. Data Smog was an assessment of the information age we had then just begun to enter, and it established him as a kind of cyber-skeptic. Today in Slate, David re-reads his book to see what he got right and what he got wrong.
That prompted me to re-read my original reaction to Data Smog to see how it holds up.