Book Review: An Army of Davids
That truth-is-stranger-than-fiction factor keeps getting jacked up on us on a fairly regular, maybe even exponential, basis. I think that's something peculiar to our time. I don't think our grandparents had to live with that.-William Gibson, No Maps for These Territories
One of the two jobs I am working this semester is at Morris Library, in the Reserves, where professors put things into controlled circulation for their classes. With the rise of convering documents into pdf files and placing them- password protected- on the web, as well as one of my shifts being relatively early in the day on Saturdays, I get to read a lot. This morning, I read An Army of Davids. This book is amazing.
Do not mistake this enthusiams as bias towards the author, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, whom I met at CPAC. This book should be read by anyone who hopes to live well into the next 25-50 years. Some may dismiss this book at first glance as a love letter to bloggers. They would be very wrong. This book is suburbia's version of Thomas L. Friedman's The World Is Flat. In a way, the localization of globalization. An Army of Davids is about the triumph of the individual. There is only an interlude dedicated to blogging, as blogs are only one weapon in the Army.
Personally, this book contains a convergance of my many interests, and of things I have read recently (except for the Anglosphere). It touches on the issue of big government, which Size Matters discusses in detail. Reynolds, ever the futurist, talks about the future of health and nanotechnology, something John Scalzi's science fiction work Old Man's War explores in detail. In fact, An Army of Davids often treads the border of science fiction and science fact.
The future of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson is on the horizon. Entrepreneurs and cyberpunk have a lot in common. An entrepreneur-based society, like the one America is moving towards, is juxtaposed against what Reynolds labels "the Dilbert office," and towards a higher percentage of self-employment, either through small businesses or eBay and Amazon.com. An employment system such as that, moving towards new-cottage industry, away from monolitioc and more in the direction of decentralization, is inherently cyberpunk. I have touched on the issues of cyberpunk and society previously, but I feel more is in order. Reynolds discusses the value to society of war games (and video games in general), in An Army of Davids which ties directly into one of the main characters of Cryptonomicon, who created such games for a while.
Inherent in most video games, and in the genre of cyberpunk, is the need for survival. Players of wargames or other simulations, whether it be The Sims or Halo, acquire skills for dealing with situations in real life. A player of The Sims may be better in dealing with social situations than others, as a Halo player may have a better understanding of modern infantry tactics, and may have a better understanding of military affairs than someone without that background (as Reynolds argues). Cyberpunk is the individual standing in firm opposition to the monolith. The 21st century will be the many individuals (the Davids), standing in firm opposition to the monolith (the Goliaths).
The empowerment of the individual, through blogging, home industry, and other mechanisms, is the future. It just isn't widely distributed yet.
Welcome Instapundit readers!
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