" Information is born free, but everywhere is found in chains." So, Nicholas Carr–in his latest and characteristically stimulating challenge to conventional thinking about technology–might have paraphrased Rousseau. We are destined, Carr argues, to see the Internet become a global utility that reduces every software company’s profits, shrinks corporate IT spending, increases income inequality, threatens the efficacy of democracy, empowers governments and businesses to control individuals, and foreshadows the creation of artificial intelligence, or at least the implanting of microprocessors directly into our brains. It is enough to make anyone want to log out.