One of the oldest and soundest rules in intellectual life is “never get in a parsing contest with a skunk.” It is a principle that the lively, intelligent, combative cultural critic Lee Siegel forgot in autumn 2006, when he gave in to the temptation to respond to comments about him posted on his blog at The New Republic’s Web site. Some of the comments were anonymous and abusive  featuring allegations of chromosomal deficiencies and pedophilia  and Siegel replied under the pseudonym “sprezzatura,” praising his own work and denouncing his critics (“You couldn’t tie Siegel’s shoelaces”). When it emerged that Siegel was sprezzatura, he was pilloried in the blogosphere, suspended by The New Republic and, “in good American fashion,” he writes, rewarded with the opportunity “to write the book on Web culture that I’d long wanted to write.”

Under the circumstances, no one would expect that new book, “Against the Machine,” to be a valentine to the Internet. The book describes itself, in its first sentence, as being “about the way the Internet is reshaping our thoughts about ourselves, other people and the world around us.” The view it takes of that reshaping is an angry, dark one. Siegel sees the Internet as “the first social environment to serve the needs of the isolated, elevated, asocial individual.” “Against the Machine” sets out to explore the consequences of that fact.

There is a variety of Luddite cultural pessimist who sees the Internet as inherently trivial, a gigantic nonevent in the history of man. Most Net naysayers are in that camp, but Siegel isn’t one of them. In that sense, he agrees with the Net’s boosters and hucksters. He thinks that “the Internet is possibly the most radical transformation of private and public life in the history of humankind.” The trouble is that “from the way it is publicly discussed, you would think that this gigantic jolt to the status quo had all the consequences of buying a new car.” Siegel’s mission is to make his readers think about the negative effects of the Internet  its destructive impact on our culture, on our polity and, perhaps most important, on our sense of ourselves.

The indictment comes with a number of counts. Siegel argues that the Internet invites people to “carefully craft their privacy into a marketable, public style.” In doing so it creates an environment in which everything is on display all the time, whether on YouTube, on Internet dating sites or in the blogosphere. This turns the culture into a giant popularity contest, an expanded and never-ending version of high school. “You must sound more like everyone else than anyone else is able to sound like everyone else,” Siegel writes. Thanks to the Internet, and to shows like “American Idol,” we are encouraged to believe in a phony idea of interactivity, as “all popular culture aspires to full viewer participation.” “Popular culture,” he argues, “used to draw people to what they liked. Internet culture draws people to what everyone else likes.” Siegel makes the strong point that “what the Internet hypes as ‘connectivity’ is, in fact, its exact opposite.” People sitting on their own in front of computer screens  this once would have been called disconnectedness or atomization. Siegel is blistering on the “surreal world of Web 2.0, where the rhetoric of democracy, freedom and access is often a fig leaf for antidemocratic and coercive rhetoric; where commercial ambitions dress up in the sheep’s clothing of humanistic values; and where, ironically, technology has turned back the clock from disinterested enjoyment of high and popular art to a primitive culture of crude, grasping self-interest.”