The New Seekers: article in The Spectator

My article, The New Seekers, is the lead in the Arts Section of this week's Spectator. It begins,

In Version 2.0 of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith will have a 'preferred customer' gold card for Googlezon, the corporation that results from the merger of the internet giants Google and Amazon. Google has completed its mission to organise all the world’s words, images and sounds and make them easy to find; and, once you've found what you want, Amazon sells it to you. By recording everything you purchase, look for, look at, listen to or read, Googlezon comes to know your tastes better than you yourself do. It serves you a personalised programme of recommendations and targeted promotions, all of these backed up with patented One-Click™ ordering. You need never again use your initiative to track down new favourites: the privatised Ministry of Information has anticipated your every need. [read on]

As you may recognise, this scenario, and the image above, are taken from the famous EPIC 2014 film. The article covers some of the same ground as the talk I gave at the RSA today — the podcast and slides from which will be on the RSA's site shortly. [Update, 12 October: Andrew Collins has blogged some great comments on our RSA discussion, dig those links.]

Meanwhile Jon Sobel has posted a meticulous review of Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll for BlogCritics magazine. He's mostly favourable (and indeed generous) but takes me to task for ignoring "political matters like net neutrality, privacy concerns, and censorship". He's justified in pointing that out. This latest article doesn't fully address those matters, and could still be accused of having a "sunny disposition" (oh, if only you knew me!) but maybe engages just a little more with the political dimension. See more reviews.