There’s a lot that’s right with Lanier’s analyses, and it’s accomplished with a concision and wit that occasionally spills over into genuine hilarity, as in Lanier’s satire of the power relations between the Siren Servers and the average participant in the digital economy. In this funny segment, he imagines a real world functioning similarly to our current or near-future digital world. In the imagined scenario, the parents of some children setting up a lemonade stand receive notice that they must apply to the fictional über-Facebook, StreetBook, for a jointly operated “Lemonade Stand” app. An accompanying contract blatantly advantages StreetBook over the Lemonade Stand partners at every turn. Finally, at the end, in all caps, the contract reveals the totality of StreetBook’s domination: “STREETBOOK MAY CHANGE OR AMEND ANY AND ALL ASPECTS OF THIS AGREEMENT ENTERED INTO BY YOU AT ANY TIME. STREETBOOK ACCEPTS NO LIABILITY OF ANY KIND.”

This cracked me up, having read contracts not dissimilar to this on a few occasions. But then I realized that the contracts I was remembering were from conventional, pre-digital media corporations. And therein lies one of the biggest flaws in Lanier’s tome. His view of pre-digital capitalism — and the middle-class lifestyle it granted to a fairly substantial number of (white) people — is more than a little bit gauzy.

In fact, once you get past the critical part of the book and begin to gather glimpses of its advocacy, there’s a strong undercurrent of nostalgia for a very specific set of economic and social conditions that defined Western democratic capitalism during the second half of the 20th century. To wit: according to Lanier’s late-20th-century sensibility, in order to have a thriving middle class with economic dignity, we must recode our networked system in a way that causes the market to reward efforts with payments in currency. The trouble is — in the face of disintermediation and automation — said system has to contort itself in peculiar (and, most of all, unlikely) ways for this to occur. The market, left to its current devices, won’t have a reason to pay enough people enough money for what they do to support a booming middle class. Lanier’s solution for this is… well… very complicated.