What Just Happened, by James Gleick

Trails through the hi-tech jungle

A couple of years ago, James Gleick wrote Faster, about how technology was making everything in our lives faster. It was a straitjacket of a subject, holding together facts unhappy at being held. Technology isn't doing that everywhere, and the examples felt strained.

Yet now he has hit on a marvellous journey around our technology-drenched world, and in doing so produced a far better overview of what has happened in the past decade. Get past the shop-worn title and this collection of pieces originally published in The New York Times, is very special.

Gleick's laconic style is ideal for declawing the hype-fuelled madmen who infest the tech biz. On calling the phone company with a problem: "Sometimes a human being... will give you a first name, and sometimes a last name, but never both – contributing to a sense that the phone company is some kind of covert operation and you are the Enemy."

Like you, he has frayed his nerves trying to get sense from software support. Back in 1994, he provoked a Microsoft engineer to exasperation, and a defence of the absurd behaviour of an early version of Word: "That's not a bug, that's a feature." In other words, we meant it to work wrong.

One aspect of this book is ideally tailored to modern life. It's short; it's choppy; it jumps from subject to subject. Nowadays, so do we, at least if we're exposed to the virus of internet technology for much time. The book flies you over the rainforest canopy of the online jungle, occasionally swooping down to pull up an interesting specimen.

Such as: the domain-name madness; why so many things say beep; junk e-mail; the (still unrealised) promise of digital cash; the shell game of internet advertising; millennium bug hype; and pervasive computing. The latter perfectly embodies his comment, made elsewhere: "I have seen the future, and it's still in the future". While never dystopian, Gleick isn't utopian either.

When he focuses, the results are surgical. He dissects the emollient language Microsoft uses to gloss over its enormous deficiencies. Serious bugs that will kill your machine are "issues", unless Microsoft knows about them already, in which case they're "known issues". And one of the most acute chapters is his analysis of Microsoft's monopolistic position in computing. Untangling anything from an interview with Microsoft is hard; putting it into context harder; making that readable, and even enjoyable, the work of a master. Gleick does it. It's a pleasure flying with him.