This is a well-written and timely book. It's a very good rejoinder to the seemingly constant revival of the "Californian ideology" and net fetishism that always seems to crop up (and has done so recently). If Alex Galloway's book Protocol showed how the net, far from dispersing power and domination in some magical transformation, rather rendered forms of control into the protocols themselves, this book follows up on that elaborating a micropolitical approach to authority on the net. Or basically, rather than to continue reproducing the net fetishist fantasy story of how digital democracy and collaboration does away with authority and command, O'Neil looks at how power and authority accrues and develops within them. And this is very valuable because wishing away such forms of power does not make them disappear but rather makes them difficult to discuss, confront, or arrange differently. In order to work towards a more egalitarian engagement and relation to digital collaboration one would have to start from an open discussion of how power and authority actually works on the net, which is precisely what this book does.
