A review by colophonphile
Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff

This book definitely makes more sense when read alongside the recent ones by Kevin Kelly and by Jaron Lanier. Like them, it's something of a correction on the tech-evangelism that has marked much of its author's earlier works. If Lanier's is a rangy diatribe, and Kelly's a concertedly developed argument, Rushkoff's is a list: it's 10 ideas, laid out plainly for a common reader. The last of these 10 ideas ("commands," a joke on the 10 commandments), the one from which the book takes its title, is the important one. The title pretty much says it all: in a world that is mediated increasingly by software, our lives are in many ways affected by the decision-making of the people who program the software. People who don't program are, in effect, to some degree or another, at the mercy of those who do. The answer? Learn to program. It sounds simplistic, and to some extent it is, but demystifying programming (it's not rocket science; it's the math equivalent of writing intelligently) is a valuable lesson.