The Techno-Human Condition, by Branden R Allenby & Daniel Sarewitz (MIT Press, £19.95)
Utopian celebrants of humanity's technological enhancement, "transhumanists" exemplify a wider cultural mistake: that of conflating three levels of technology. Level I (say, a single jet aircraft) is functional and well understood; Level II (the air transportation system) is complex; and Level III (air travel and its longer-term social, cultural, and climatic effects) exhibits "wicked complexity": no one really understands what is going on. Unfortunately, the authors argue, people assume that Level I fixes can be applied to Level II or III situations: eg, that "cognitive enhancement" drugs would be good for society. "By what definition," the authors ask innocently, "is a jerk with better concentration a better person than he was before?"

In their thoughtful and provocative essay, Allenby and Sarewitz make some nice observations (eg, that computer-search tech represents "congealed cognition"), speculate amusingly-but-seriously about "cyborg insects" and "telepathic helmets", and polemically overstate our general ignorance. (They think that the failure to reduce CO₂ emissions counts against the validity of climate science, while a passing dismissal of "evidence-based whatever" is glib and irrational.) Their final recommendation that innovative institutions should be required to conduct "ignorance-based deliberative activities" and "anticipatory self-negation activities" seems fun. Or hang on: maybe it doesn't.

Barefoot into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia, by Becky Hogge (Barefoot Publishing, £8.99)
"Flash published" in paperback and electronically, and bravely self-described as a "zeitgest book", this is a brisk travelogue (with some awkward local colour) of interviews with modern techno-dissidents. There are leather-coated Germans breaking the security of the GSM network; hippy-hacker pioneer Stewart Brand (the 1960s acid testers, as Hogge puts it, "got tired of tripping and uploaded themselves to a new electronic frontier"); campaigners for "electronic freedom" and citizen privacy; and hacker-intellectuals, such as the particularly interesting Ethan Zuckerman.

The WikiLeaks Iraq and Cablegate affairs form the shadowy background to the writing of this story; Assange asserts an interesting defence of the News of the World's journalistic practices, and expresses what the author calls "the hacker's disdain that the voicemail intercepts should be called 'hacks' at all".

Hitchens vs Blair: Is Religion a Force for Good in the World?, edited by Rudyard Griffiths (Transworld, £7.99)
Transhumanists and techno-utopians have not quite yet rendered obsolete old-fashioned monotheistic religion, the modern "debate" over which is succinctly encapsulated in this slim and amusing transcription of a live face-off in Canada last year. The two expound apparently conflicting positions but share, as well as a poignant faith in the rightness of the Iraq war, some deeper rhetorical commitments.

Both describe religion in political terms (Hitchens: "a celestial dictatorship [] a kind of divine North Korea"; Blair: religion's "progressive framework"), and both liberally exploit the no-true-Scotsman fallacy. If religious people do bad things, Blair says, that is a "perversion of faith", while if they do good things, that is its "essence"; for his part, Hitchens insists: "You're not really religious if you don't believe that there is a divine supervision involved." Blair also uses the occasion vigorously to advertise his "Faith Foundation", which a Hitchens partisan would no doubt unfairly call a shining example of ignorance-based deliberative activity.