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Darknet - the “now” in book format

Perhaps it’s that I’m used to holding out to read books a bit after the hype has died down, but JD Lasica’s Darknet is downright freaky in how current events it still feels. I’m only about halfway through now, but it’s been very good. And weird. It’s like not having to zip around and hunt and read blogposts to get the back story. JD said he finished it last summer, but it was clearly edited to include events up to late 2004 (and I can’t find it now, but I thought I even saw a 2005 date).

But it’s so current it’s freaky. Like in yesterday’s massive news trawling I ran across this bit about Macrovision and what you can and can’t do and why. And TiVo’s email newsletter is promoting Record, Burn, Go, a $400 combo DVDR-PVR device.

We’re so much in the midst of this now, I wonder how it will standup once we get further out - or if it will be like Smart Mobs, which I read quite a bit after it came out (it think it described the Euro-Asian mobile zeitgeist much more successfully than here in the US).

I’ll write more later, but wanted to throw out how relevant the book is immediately. The stories about people (a bunch of whom I know) are much crisper than either Howard Rheingold or Neil Gershenfeld manage - somehow the interviewees speak more for themselves without extraneous description. Usually I take personal stories as just color and dialogue, but JD does a good job here weaving them into the larger narrative. This is just an off-the-cuff observation, but I’ll have to ask JD how he managed all this info. There were some direct quotes in here from a long time ago.

Things like quotes and sources are an odd thing for me to pick up on in a book (other than as bibliographic inputs to further research!). Jayson Blair was just ridiculous, but the story of Michelle Delio hits a lot closer to home since I can recall reading (and like Techdirt, scratching my head at) some of her pieces.