Book Reviews

Part of the Media Laboratory's heritage (its origins are in the School of Architecture) is a startling receptivity to the arts, especially music and the visual arts, and Brand repeatedly returns to this subject. Even here, intellectualism reigns: It is symptomatic that the lab members' interest in literature seems to be limited to science fiction. This lopsidedness echoes Turkle's complaint that hackers ignore the texture (emotion) of music in favor of its structure (intellect). Not an engineer himself, Brand is not always in a position to critically evaluate what he saw; I was reminded of persons who, on seeing ELIZA, concluded that computerized psychotherapy was just around the corner. As Brand points out, the Media Lab replaces the publish-orperish imperative with demo or die, and anyone who has produced a demo knows something about practical mendacity.