Reviews for Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control

The average rating for Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control based on 2 reviews is 1 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-09-09 00:00:00 Steffen Liebenow Okay. That's it. I give up. This book fucking blows. You know, I was trying and trying to stick with it, because buried under all the shit, there are some important critiques of science as a belief system, and scary information about government experiments and research. But no. It's over, less than halfway through. I cannot STAND derrick jensen's over the top use of rhetorical manipulation. It's incredibly problematic the way he throws around language and equates systems of power without illuminating the crucial differences. The breaking point of the book for me, p. 98: He's talking about sitting on a curb instead of the designated bench outside a WalMart. And how he can feel people wanting him to sit on the bench and not on the curb. To conform. Yeah. Ok. THEN HE SAYS, and I quote: "The same psychological pressures to conform would be at work were I instead standing with a pistol in my hand, pointing it at a Russian Jew kneeling beside a pit filled with writhing bodies, or with a chainsaw in my hand, pointing it at an ancient tree, or poised at a mass media magazine rack, choosing between Solidier of Fortune, Penthouse, or Car and Driver." Ugh. Fuck you. Sitting on the curb rather than a bench is not the same as any of these things, nor are they the same as each other. Shut the fuck up. Oh, and he has this quaint habit of always referring to Native people and other folks of color right before or after he talks about animals and other "nonhumans." Fucking. Hate. It. Alright. Now that I am over my initial surge of rage about this book, I will elaborate: Derrick Jensen is attempting to discuss power and control and how they relate in a holistic way to our society. But his argument is seriously weakened by his conflation of various systems of power as the same. In another example to accompany the lovely one above, he comes up with a scenario where he says, "one day, you get pulled over. It might be a cop. It might be a soldier. Or it might me a Starbucks agent. You can't tell the difference." The key is that in order to make the argument of his book accurate and useful to his audience, he needs to illuminate those differences while connecting them to the whole of society. In this, he fails completely, choosing instead to rely on over-the-top rhetorical shenanigans. A cop is not the same as a soldier, and neither of them are the same as a person working for Starbucks. I mean, please. I guess he made that decision to try to get people pissed off about how things are. I think the factual information presented in the book about government spending, research and experiments speaks for itself in that regard, and that his incendiary prose obscures and distracts from those facts, rendering the entire book relatively useless and annoying, not to mention patently offensive and inaccurate in several instances. Still hate it.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-04-11 00:00:00 Brandon Pauley I really liked this book in college, but the truth is that Derrick Jensen is a terrible person -- and if you're looking for a deep thinker worth following, he's not it. I apologize for my formerly glowing review. It's retracted.