This looks cool! There's been so many books with a utopian or dystopian take on technology, it's refreshing to see someone tapping into the wonder. I've certainly experienced wonder with my programming journey.
I really appreciate this! Thanks. I think focusing on wonder might be the way of providing a kind of healthy medium between those extreme utopian and dystopian approaches.
Maybe a hot take, but for a modern overview of the way people at large interact with computers, I find it almost disingenuous to paint it in a positive light - wonder included - without also showing the dark sides. The gray area only exists because the machines themselves are so capable when removed from the realities of how they're used.
It's as if we have the cure for cancer, but we only give it to people that are willing to watch 1 hour of ads every day. Like, yeah, the technology is great, but that social implication is terrifying.
To me, a book strictly about the wonder - ignoring these realities - feels.. vapid? dishonest? I don't want a word quite so loaded, but I'm struggling to find a better one.
This does hit home for me though. I'm currently working on a re-write of my pages on this subject on my website [0], where the current public version there really is overly complain-y and really misses the mark. The new version I'm working on explicitly alternates between negatives and positives, with sections that alternate between dark with light text and light with dark text to indicate the shift in tone and as much as I think that's beneficial for a reader, it's even more so for me as the author, to recognize when I'm writing too much in the "dark" section.
At the same time, I don't want to fall into the fallacy of moderation. If one side says climate change isn't real and one side does, it's not as if truth is somewhere in the middle. It's real. It's bad. Same for anything about computers. If I say right to repair, the DMCA, enshitification, etc. etc. are huge problems and pretend we're doing enough to fix them, that's just as dishonest.
Writing this has convinced me to pick up OP's book and read it, if for no other reason than to be inspired by the meta, the framing that I'm talking about - though I'm sure it'll be a good read in its own right. (Even if my prior, top-level comment about being unsure of the meat still holds)
