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Books

Don’t buy The Glass Cage at the airport if you want a restful flight, warns Will Self

Will Self,  reviewing Nicholas Carr’s The Glass Cage, predicts the inexorable rise of the computer in a defiantly soulless society

28 February 2015

9:00 AM

28 February 2015

9:00 AM

The Glass Cage: Where Automation is Taking Us Nicholas Carr

The Bodley Head, pp.276, £20

Nicholas Carr has a bee in his bonnet, and given his susceptibilities this might well be a cybernetic insect, cunningly constructed by a giant tech company with the express purpose of irritating him — a likely culprit might be the Tyrell Corporation in Ridley Scott’s future-dystopic film Blade Runner.

In 2012 Carr — whose name has homophonic overtones of Cassandra — published a minatory work on the internet and the web called The Shallows.

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