Laurie Penny's review of the book is this: “This book is a watchman’s shout in the night.” It’s a shout that desperately needs to be heard. What worries me is that the warning cry is being raised so poorly and with such little understanding of what makes people change their behaviour that the rest of us might dismiss it as background noise.

What article has everyone else been reading?

She's sympathetic to Assange's and other hackers' concerns, has put aside the issue of alleged rape, is not talking about feminism, and writes (reasonably) that we all have a vague knowledge that we're signing our privacy away voluntarily. Why on earth all the criticism of things she's not said and clearly doesn't mean?

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"This is how totalitarianism works. It’s not just the threat of violence, in the cypherpunks’ words – it’s also the threat of exclusion."

To be fair, and I think I followed the gist of Laurie's argument, this is a reasonable point. The only trouble is that people who are excluded from society are generally excluded anyway and therefore internet exclusion is rendered meaningless.

I think the problem with the social media is that it is anything but social: the effect of it on the street is lots of anxious-looking people gazing into their smartphones, and online they are bickering away forming cabals which have no relationship with reality.

"You aren’t stupid. You knew what you were doing when you ticked the little box signing over your personal information, your intimate photographs and the history of your private heartbreak that you can now read in a cold text-and-picture box that isn’t yours, displayed next to adverts optimised to suit whatever products an algorithm thinks you might buy.

Nobody was holding a knife to your throat. You gave those parts of yourself freely, because you were afraid that if you didn’t you would be left behind, and unless someone comes along and puts a gentle, understanding hand on your wrist you may very well continue to give and give until there’s no part of your private self that can’t be sold."

No, Laurie. That's you.

I take issue with your supposition that there is no utility in spreading awareness of these issues, because "people already know."

I was not aware, when I signed up for these services, of the scope of my vulnerability. When by turns I became aware, I resolved to remove myself from these services, and did.

Most people have, yes, a mild inkling that surveillance is something that happens, sometimes to some people, but they do not understand it is happening to all the time to almost all people because they do not understand the technology they are using, and they do not have easy access to documentation that makes it undeniable. I know this because I have had countless conversations on these issues, and the various stages of denialism about them are extremely conventional, rarely deviating from sequence:

First denial that it's really that bad, and indignant resistance to hearing evidence as to why it is, because that starts the slippery slope towards actually having to harmonize one's actions with one's beliefs.

Next, when the evidence becomes undeniable, acceptance that yes, it's really that bad, but a curious disconnect between acknowledgement of the problem and the action it so clearly requires. It will be ok, somehow, but the one thing we all know for certain is that we shouldn't bother taking responsibility for our own safety. We shouldn't have to!

This second step is your form of denialism. Your article is emblematic of a particular sort of spoiled Western narcissism, that works from a deep-seated assumption that having a Facebook account ought to be something like a *fundamental right.* After all, without it, how could we ever have the social life we so jealously require? A Facebook presence is so central a pillar of our vanity, so indispensable a salve for our cosseted first-world "loneliness" that even if having an account means we are exposed to the most pervasive surveillance regime in history - more pervasive, yes, than Stasi East Germany - well, that's got to be ok, right? Or if we ignore it it might just go away. Because faced with the choice between our freedoms and dignities being eroded, or deleting our facebook accounts, the truly unthinkable thing is that we would delete our facebook accounts!

The hacker movement has spent decades building practical solutions to these problems. It is not that difficult to use them. But people have to want to first. That's where awareness-raising about just how endangered we are comes in. And here you are, deploying all the classic denialist tropes in order to present people who do as paranoid nerdy boys who do not have the great but paralysingly ennui-laden insight into human nature that you do.

What's your solution, Laurie? You make pains to acknowledge that Assange might actually be on to something here (only to patronise him over his derived conclusions), but that acknowledgement demands a response. You owe this discourse a suggestion of what the alternatives are.

I'll be buying this book, not because I feel I am likely to learn something entirely new, but because I want to have it years down the line as a gift for those of my friends who take the truly infantile position on this issue that you have here: the denial of any responsibility for modifying our own monstrously careless behaviour. I expect the schadenfreude will provide me at least a day's respite from the contemplation of freedom lost.

I hope someone will do the same for you.

No, you know, forget all that. Personally, I am glad there is someone out there at the vanguard of our legion of privilege and self-absorption, fighting for our freedom from well-intentioned advice, and our right to have a facebook account, even if it's directly contrary to our interests. Fight that good fight, Laurie Penny. I won't.

Well said.

Laurie asserts that this is a discussion with Assange's "most devoted followers."

These people are not Assange's "followers." They are Assange's peers, as anyone with any insight into the global hacker community will know. She thereby diminishes their activism and their achievements, by portraying them as mere supplicants to Assange, when, as we know, Jacob Appelbaum's work on the tor project, and Jeremie Zimmermann's work torpedoing ACTA in the EU Parliament this year well deserve their own recognition.

And then we have this:

"It is almost impossible to discuss the bare facts of this very real crisis without sounding a little bonkers – the government can read your emails! Big corporations are looking through your drunk party pictures!"

I have read the original transcripts of this interview, and viewed the extended discussion online, and this is an extraordinary banalization of the actual argument. The idea that every communication that our societies make is archived forever on government controlled databases presents a final challenge to the idea of legitimate and effective dissent within society. It is a realiziation that looms enormous for anyone who, beyond the incredible banality of drunk party pictures, cares for the health of civil society, for the maintenance of the rule of law, for the defense of a space within which citizens can present a legitimate and effective challenge to the injustices perpetrated by entrenched power.

Anarchists and Occupy activists are being investigated by Grand Juries in the United States. Law enforcement agencies have immense and unchecked powers to seize private communications. These are vastly worrying trends, with tremendous consequences for the character of our societies. In the face of this vortex of horror, Laurie Penny, a purported activist, performs an inexplicable diminishment of the powerful and pressing arguments Assange and co make, and represents them as a group of paranoid conspiracy theorists griping about exposed party pics.

I'm just really disappointed with this, Laurie. You have misrepresented the seriousness and urgency of Assange's message, apparently to satisfy a personal hostility.

Has Laurie even read this book, or is she just using it as an excuse to pontificate?

If the RT discussion on which this book is based is anything to go by, Assange does not "fail to understand something fundamental about people." He explicitly says, in that discussion, that he doesn't imagine that global humanity will manage to learn how to live safely with the internet, and that the actual prospect is likely rather bleak.

The discussion is laced throughout with a nuanced understanding of precisely the collective behavioural tendencies of human beings that Laurie so righteously brandishes as a knock-down argument in this review.

Does anyone who reads this review come away with the impression that things like this are contained in the book?

From the transcripts:

"Jacob Appelbaum: People are compensated for being in the Stasi, and they are compensated for being in Facebook. It's just that in Facebook they are compensated with social credits, to get laid by their neighbour, instead of, you know, being paid off directly. I think it is important to relate it to the human aspect because it is not just about technology, it is about control and control through surviellance."

or

"Jacob Appelbaum: In the case of Facebook we have democratized surveilance and instead of paying people off the way the Stasi did... we reward them as a culture by, you know, they get laid now. They report on their friends, and like, "hey, so and so got engaged." "Oh, so and so broke up." "Oh, I know who to call now.""

In short, no, you would not get the impression that this discussion happens in this book, because this is precisely the angle Laurie claims as her own, purportedly in counterpoint to Assange and co.

Therefore, her review takes the form:

1. Invoke a paranoid, offensively male straw man who has no understanding of human nature.

2. Leverage conventional wisdom and unexamined prejudice against it without anything in the way of argument.

3. Having exhausted mere prejudice, plunder the actual book for the nuanced understanding of human nature that forms the basis of the work.

4. Pass it off as your own argument, and brandish it at your paranoid, offensively male strawman.

While you're at it, signpost how irrelevant the sex politics are so that you can get a huge, suppurating helping of rape-smear into your review of a book that has nothing to do with it.

On the basis of what I have seen here, I am not convinced that Laurie has actually read this book. I'll be ordering my copy from OR Books.

"If you want to change the world, you need to sketch out the possibility of a life without the shackles that you see and others can’t, invite everyone else to join you there and make it convenient for them to do so, even if you don’t like them, even if they aren’t as clever as you are."

Good advice, shame that Miss Penny doesn't abide by it herself.

Can't quite agree with Arbed - yes, Laurie seems to be taking the allegations re Assange at face value, whereas deeper examination of the actions of those involved, the timing of those actions and the motives offered really do cast doubt or at least beg questions that should be answered. But..Laurie is still that rarity among British journalists, one willing to go after a subject with passion, to actually and openly grind a few of her own axes, because after all thats what good, campaigning journalism is about, grinding moral axes until they are sharp enough to cut through the Gordian knots of secrecy. I'll keep reading.