p. 26 on enslavement, and enslavement by

« It can be no coincidence that the computer emerges at just a moment when the public ideology of human enslavement has been changed by intense social effort. We address computers as our slaves, and never think of the power and satisfaction we feel precisely in knowing how perfectly the machine bends to our will. We exercise and intensify mastery over the machine at the individual and the social levels; we experience frustration when the real world fails to live up to the striated and rigid computational model.

Yet we continue to look to the computer for solutions to this problem, itself largely created and intensified by the computer. We don't see people who use computers extensively (modern Americans and others around the world) breaking out everywhere in new forms of democratic action that disrupt effectively the institutional power of capital (see Dahlberg and Siapera 2007, Jenkins and Thorburn 2003, and Simon, Corrales, and Wolfensberger 2002 for close analysis of some of the more radical claims about democriti-zation), yet our discourse says this is what computers bring. Our own society has displayed strong tendencies toward authoritarianism and perhaps even corporate fascism, two ideologies strongly associated with rationalism, and yet we continue to endorse even further tilts in the rationalist di-rection.

This book is written in the hope that this historical imbalance between rationalism and " anti-rationalism" has gone about as far as it can go it the rationalist direction. Perhaps, despite appearances, there is a possible future in which computers are more powerful, more widespread, cheaper, and easier to use and at the same time have much less influence over our lives and our thoughts. »