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

In the wake of The Making of a Counter Culture Theodore Roszakestablished himself as the pre-eminent critic of twentieth-century Americansociety and technocracy.

Roszak later published The Cult of Information,a word of caution to a world that would soon be inundated by computing devicesand data driven industries.

Even more relevant today than at its originalpublication, The Cult of Information stands as a prophetic work; one ofthe first attempts at an analysis of the dangers of big data in a worlddominated by the digital.

Roszak's predictions of a world for which the foundations were beinglaid 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 mostindustries via a stranglehold on marketing and demand data.

Those at the bottomof 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 'hashad'?) on the way elections are won across the world.

The Cult ofInformation endures as an alarm bell from the birth of the Information Age.