The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking

In the wake of The Making of a Counter Culture Theodore Roszak established himself as the pre-eminent critic of twentieth-century American society and technocracy. Roszak later published The Cult of Information, a word of caution to a world that would soon be inundated by computing devices and data driven industries. Even more relevant today than at its original publication, The Cult of Information stands as a prophetic work; one of the first attempts at an analysis of the dangers of big data in a world dominated by the digital. Roszak''s predictions of a world for which the foundations were being laid in 1986 are eerily accurate from our twenty-first-century vantage point. One reads of a two-tier society wherein a class of ''data merchants'' rule most industries via a stranglehold on marketing and demand data. Those at the bottom of the pile will watch as traditional jobs are automated or disappear abroad. We even get a glimpse of the effect data collection could have (read ''has had''?) on the way elections are won across the world. The Cult of Information endures as an alarm bell from the birth of the Information Age. See more