Review: David's Sling

I learned about David’s Sling when recommending another of Marc Stiegler’s books, Earthweb, to a friend. He said this book had really affected his thinking when he read it back when it was new. If you only pick up one of those two books, I’d recommend Earthweb, but David’s Sling is also a good read if you liked Earthweb or any of Stiegler’s other work.

The general gist is that the Americans and Soviets are fighting using “industrial age” technologies, while an organization called the Zetetic Institute, which became famous for developing an effective technique for quitting smoking, is trying to develop an “information age” weapon. I don’t want to give too much away, so suffice it to say that the “old guard” aren’t too keen on seeing some upstart organization show them up by building something faster, cheaper, and more effective than the extremely expensive stuff they’re taking forever to build.

The book also covers a bunch of the techniques the Zetetic Institute uses, chief among them being the “decision duel”, which I imagine is a precursor in Stiegler’s thinking to prediction/decision/contract markets, which show up in Earthweb, and are what got my friend interested in these markets before Earthweb even came out.

Available as a DRM-free ebook from the publisher (Baen), though it’s clearly from a scan of a printed copy without a lot of human editing.