Overthrowing the tyrant, e-mail
The Internet would give Karl Marx pause. On the one hand, it obliterates profits by commoditizing any part of the economy we can digitize (music, advertising, newspapers, software development…). Yet as it brings economic justice down upon the bourgeois, it numbs the proletariat mind in ways Marx thought only religion could.
Literary critic and Granta editor John Freeman wrote The Tyranny of E-mail to help us understand — and escape — enslavement by this new machine. My review in the Boston Globe.