Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy

Really enjoyed the look back at a time we shared with other nerds.

The book starts out strong and gave me a lot of flashbacks to time gone by. I wasn't in the Scene in any meaningful way(per the book I was a "lamer") but there was enough nostalgia factor there. About halfway through or so it started to become a bit more like one professor's attempt to take a little data and extrapolate it into a book. At times he is judgmental and his politics leak through (i.e. heavily Left). If it were an analysis of some tribe in Africa or Asia he'd probably get a bit of yelling at for being "orientalist" or some other catchy term for being judgmental of cultures one isn't part of.To me the most interesting thing was understanding how things were made...Less so his social analysis on minimal input. I now understand why Malinowski talked about participant observation in ethnography: looking from the outside is just too limited.