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The Best of Technology Writing 2006 Koerner, Brendan I. Contents Introduction Brendan I. Koerner La Vida Robot Joshua Davis[Wired] The Record Effect Alex Ross[New Yorker] When the Sous-Chef Is an Inkjet David Bernstein[New York Times] The Rise of the Plagiosphere Edward Tenner[Technology Review] The Xbox Auteurs Clive Thompson[New York Times Magazine] Throwing Google at the Book Farhad Manjoo[Salon] Why the Web Is Like a Rain Forest Steven Johnson[Discover] China's Next Cultural Revolution Lisa Margonelli[Wired] The Coil and I Mike Daisey[Slate] The Book Stops Here Daniel H. Pink[Wired] Have They Got a Deal for You Joseph Turow[Washington Post] The Trend Spotter Steven Levy[Wired] The Right Price for Digital Music Adam L. Penenberg[Slate] Will Artificial Muscle Make You Stronger? Dan Ferber[Popular Science] Plugged Into It All Richard Waters[Financial Times] Sex, Fame, and PC Baangs Jim Rossignol[PC Gamer UK] Crying, While Eating Daniel Engber[Slate] Cats with 10 Lives Jay Dixit[Legal Affairs] The Bookless Future David A. Bell[New Republic] Mr. Song and Dance Man David McNeill[Japan Focus] Cultural Sensitivity in Technology Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah[Koranteng's Toli] Ups and Downs of Jetpacks Justin Mullins[New Scientist] Into the Great Wide Open Jesse Sunenblick[Columbia Journalism Review] The Zombie Hunters Evan Ratliff[New Yorker] About the Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction Brendan I. Koerner Back in the frothiest dot-com days, a magazine dispatched me to write about a wunderkind software tycoon and his burgeoning company. After an adolescence largely spent coding in his bedroom, the young man had parlayed one of his freeware programs into a fortune roughly the size of Tonga’s gross domestic product. My task was to figure out what made this fresh-faced genius tick. It was an excruciatingly boring assignment. I was allowed just 30 minutes with the mastermind himself, who, though perfectly polite, wasn’t exactly a scintillating interview. (He spoke with the languid inflection of someone who’d just ingested two spoonfuls of NyQuil.) The rest of the week was taken up with meetings with marketing executives, who crowed about the company’s products being as revolutionary as the bread slicer. I struggled to stay awake as they repeatedly tossed around the phrase “return on investment.” The only memorable event came during a tour of the bowels of the company’s Staliniststyle headquarters, where the brainiest employees spent endless hours coding new products. I peeked into one cavernous room where a whey-faced kid sat transfixed at his screen. The company spokeswoman who was escorting me around explained that he was the company’s resident designer of “compilers,” the esoteric programs that translate source code into machine language. Correctly sensing that this description of Mr. Whey Face’s job wasn’t suitably poetic, she paused and tried again: “His job is to think like a machine.” Now that sounded interesting—a human being who, day in, day out, was paid to impersonate the mentality of a robot. I flirted with the idea of making this humble compiler designer the subject of the article, rather than his bland boss. The prospect of delving into the mind of a person who was blessed with such an odd and vital talent—a Doctor Doolittle of the computer age, as it were—was strangely alluring. In the end, alas, I punked out and wrote the standard paean to corporate greatness that my editor demanded. But when it came time to pull together the present collection of technology writing, I vowed to keep an eye peeled for stories that recalled that think-likea-machine piece that never was—stories that may ostensibly be about bits or motherboards but never lose sight of the human element at their core. Finding tales that satisfy these criteria was a challenge. The vast majority of technology writing is dominated by product specifications and bre