In 1989, Clifford Stoll wrote The Cuckoo's Egg, the gripping story of how he overcame the resistance (and even the outright opposition) of his employers and various federal agencies in order to lead an international effort to track down the identity of a hacker who had been using a variety of computer networks to break into Western military and scientific computers. The Cuckoo's Egg remains one of the best non-fiction works of recent years as well as an excellent introduction to the murky world of network-based hacking.

Unfortunately for admirers of Stoll's detective work, High Tech Heretic shows us the flip side of that tenacious and righteous personality that served him (and us) so well a decade ago. Stoll makes many excellent points about the role computers should (and should not) play in education, but the meat of his argument is served in a thick and inedible sauce of rambling, bitchy, and self-indulgent abuse that demeans Stoll and devalues his book.

The pity of Stoll's 200-page-long descent into geek rant is that he does lay out several simple truths that need to be said more often: Computers cannot replace human teachers. Computers can cause more problems than they solve. Schools which take money away from buying books (or hiring teachers) in order to buy computers hurt their students. K-12 education can be done at least as well without computers as with them. Learning cannot always be fun. Fun, educational computer programs are often more fun than educational, and usually do not require the kind of hard work and critical thinking that are essential to learning.

I agree wholeheartedly with Stoll about these things and I am glad he has written them, but the rhetorical methods that he uses in the process are despicable. Stoll attacks and ridicules almost every person he disagrees with, preferring to paint them as evil rather than understand their arguments. His book is rife with gaps in reasoning and flaws in logic. And to top it off, Stoll rarely offers any citations (even when he uses lengthy quotations from other works), which makes it difficult to study the issues he raises in greater depth.

What we are left with is a book written at the level and in the tone (Stoll has an annoying penchant for cloying colloquialisms) that one normally finds on a Usenet newsgroup. An example: "Hucksters of the electronic classroom will show you studies that prove on-line learning outcomes equal if not better face-to-face instruction. Uh, right." [page 97]

Beyond problems of tone or depth, Stoll's book also lacks comprehension or appreciation of the positive effects of the Internet (and of interconnectivity in general). Yes, Stoll is right to say that an electronic community is usually a poor substitute for a face-to-face community, but what he does not address is the fact that the Internet enables people to build communities that could not exist face-to-face.

To take a minor example, I am a frequent contributor to a college football newsgroup, where I can have conversations with fans of every major (and many minor) college football teams. Back in the days before the Internet, those conversations simply weren't possible -- most of the people I could meet face-to-face were boosters of the local team, the national champion, or Notre Dame. Being able to watch fans of distant schools discuss their traditions and play out their rivalries has added some good cheer to my life that would not otherwise be there, and the Internet is what has made that possible.

Another problem with High Tech Heretic is that most of the arguments that Stoll directs against the use of computers -- that they tend to isolate frequent users from their peers, that they retard healthy socialization, that some people substitute using them for face-to-face relationships -- can (and have) also been made against the reading of books. I certainly heard them when I was a bookish boy. Each argument has a grain of truth to it, but Stoll (like my mother, so long ago) takes them much too far.

And ultimately, that's the problem with High Tech Heretic: Stoll takes everything too far. With its wild overstatements and over-simplifications, this book will appeal to people who are ignorant of and afraid of computers. Unfortunately, the rest of us will have to wait for the book that will give the subject of computers in education and society the serious and critical treatment that it deserves.

Review posted: 11 December 1999