Jim Wrenn, author of the Clinton Liebrary Book 2001 Edition at clintonliebrarybook.com gives a rave review to SNL Presents The Clinton Years: "I laughed so hard my throat hurt. It will be banned from all public libraries because no one will be able to read it without laughing out loud. The book presents color pictures and text from SNL skits (about Clinton) in such a way as to elicit just as much laughter as watching the skit on Saturday Night Live."

this is hilarious. I laughed the entire time i read the book.

the author, an MIT trained economist and now on the editorial board of the NYT, brilliantly illuminates upon the New deal's economic significance. okay actually i've never read it. And the author is my dad. But i'm sure it's pretty good.

I used this book for an environmental safety class in a graduate program. I was not familiar with this discipline before this class. In the first chapter the concept is layed out, however it was not an easy reader. Too many bullets and questions. It seemed to apply more for the safety manager already employed. The ideas were a little hard to grasp as a student without a lot of experience. The OSHA website helped me to get a grip on the ideas.

I bought this book because there was a good plug on the back from Bruce Sterling, and he's usually interesting. But I don't know what he was thinking; maybe he was stoned. In fact, I am at a loss to explain any detail of this book's existence without supposing that everyone involved was seriously impared in one way or another.

Here's a sample paragraph, from page 83:

"As for the technocrats? They have long ago blasted off into hyperspace, filled with sad, but no less ecstatic, dreams of a telematic history that will never be theirs to code. An evangelical class, schooled in the combinatorial logic of virtual reality and motivated by missionary consciousness, the technological class is already descending into the spiralling depths of the sub-human. It wills itself to the will to virtuality. In return for this act of monumental hubris, it will be ejected as surplus matter by the gods of virtuality, once its servofunction has been digitally reproduced. In Dante's new version of the circling rings of virtual reality, this class operates under the sign of an ancient curse: it is wrong, just because it is so right. For not understanding the virtual hubris, it is condemned to eternal repetition of the same data byte."

And that's one of the clearer paragraphs.

The endless stream of sentences that parse, without actually saying anything, eventually put me in the mind of "travesty generators" -- computer programs that, given a set of phrases, and a passably complex grammar for combining them randomly, can spew out infinite amounts of blather, just like the above. For example:

"If one examines social realism, one is faced with a choice: either reject the neoconstructivist paradigm of narrative or conclude that the collective is capable of significance. Therefore, the subject is interpolated into a postcapitalist sublimation that includes art as a reality. Any number of narratives concerning textual objectivism exist. 'Class is intrinsically dead,' says Sontag; however, according to Scuglia[1] , it is not so much class that is intrinsically dead, but rather the failure of class. In a sense, Lyotard promotes the use of postcapitalist sublimation to deconstruct society. The subject is contextualised into a predialectic capitalism that includes language as a totality."

That paragraph was generated by a computer program.

And that program didn't even need a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as /Data Trash/ says that it did.

Whatever ideas (as opposed to mere themes, which is all I can find in most of the book) of worth that there might be in this book are buried under prose too turgid to imagine.

The questions need to be asked, true. Our society's fetishization of technological progress and free markets need to be challenged, and that is the best role for the Krokers and similar critics: poking the hornets nest and seeing who gets stung.

But there is bigger question when studying Data Trash, Hacking the Future and the Krokers' other techno-dystopian tomes: does all this jargon and rhetoric actually add up to anything? The Krokers are great at stirring the pot, but seem to have some fundamental misconceptions about the nature of technology and how, in a practical sense, it is accepted or rejected by people.

contrary to the prior reviewers, and despite my heavy training in university level (hons) british-style analytic philosophy, i found their book incredibly interesting, particularly their concept of the virtual class, a concept i've already written (crystal clear) papers on, one prior to kroker et al., and one in response. i believe they have much to say, but like most postmodern writers, get swamped in "blather" as the other reviewer called it, and spew out lots of characterisations of internet culture while disregarding clarity. but this is nothing new for postmodernists. it's quite conventional, in fact. they substitute philosophic rigour for flair. IMHO, if you're interested in internet as a cultural phenomenon, you MUST read this book. even if it displays some technological ignorance and a lot of lack of rigour. i found it fascinating, but turgid....