Searls, Stephenson, Welles, Orwell

was wandering around in Doc Searls's Reality 2.0, a you-gotta-read-em series of articles on how the web, open source software etc are changing society. ("...The Web obeys new structural and economic laws that seem to have more in common with the mathematics of loaves and fishes than with the traditional economics of scarce resources and diminishing returns...")
In one of them he points to In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson, author of (among others) SnowCrash and The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (some of the best SF out there). It's a book (ie long, so although it's online you should buy it) - a ~30 year overview/exploration of computers and television and mediated experiences and market forces and societal effects as understood via Orson Welles' Elois and Morelocks, and wonderfully illuminatory. Sample:

...police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it's explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence...

He souses even the dry stuff: "...The operating system market is a death-trap, a tar-pit, a slough of despond..." Search for "Reagan" for another good section.

fuse Orson with Welles, chop out some letters, keep the writing quality, you get Orwell ranting on political writing: (via metafilter)

...A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the
outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language
is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared
aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms,
like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
....
If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of
orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make
a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political
language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from
Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and
murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.