Mark Slouka, War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1995), is concerned with "our growing separation from reality," an important cultural trend, he thinks, epitomized by "cyberspace," where we accept the copy for the original, the representation for what it represents. This is bad news because it threatens to make us stupid, gullible, and dangerous. He dates our acceptance of abstractions for the real things back to the turn of the century, when we began to lose our place within an actual community and our connection to a particular physical landscape. Technology "was the real force behind our journey to abstraction" and "to unreality." The computer revolution, or the information revolution, threatens to complete this journey by removing us, "once and for all, from reality." This revolution is no less than "an attack on reality as human beings have always known it." Slouka is the perfect foil for technophiles like John Perry Barlow, simply paraphrasing Barlow when he writes, "we stand on the threshold of turning life itself into computer code, of transforming the experience of living in the physical world--every sensation, every detail--into a product for consumption." He asks: "What should those of us in RL make of the dizzying proliferation (and ever-increasing sophistication) of cyberspace communities--the so-called MUDs and MOOs and MUSHes? Or of the fact that an entire generation of computerjugen is now spending its leisure time in electronically generated space....?". Slouka suggests of course "that we take it *very* seriously," as an assault on reality, "the cultural equivalent of genetic engineering". While apologizing for appearing melodramatic, Slouka draws a tight analogy between totalitarian visions and MOO virtual realities: "Totalitarian visions--whether utopian fantasies or dystopian nightmares--have shared an aversion to the world in all its quotidian messigness, as well as a corresponding preoccupation with cleanliness, order, control." The virtual theorists are in fact worse than the real-world totalitarians, because they "seek to erase the eworld as we had known it." Slouka sees cyberspace as "the marriage of deconstruction and computer technology--a mating of monsters if ever there was one," but whereas "the deconstructionists could only *argue* that nothing exists outside of us--that reality is just personal perspective--the cyberists [have] machines that could *make* it so." Slouka requires a high standard for participation in virtual realities, suggested by his asking, "Would bringing the ghettos on-line increase the life expectancy of young black men?". (Does Slouka suppose that the university courses he teaches have this effect?) Black-and-white thinking pervades the book: EITHER you stay in contact with physical reality OR you spend time in virtual realities. Slippery slope fallacies are everywhere: Since folks are spending more time in virtual realities, it won't be long before we're sent "straight through the looking glass": "Already barely hanging on to objective reality, dragged downward by the accumulated weight of the unrealities we consume, we're in no condition to absorb the shock of a new generation of illusion-making technologies that threaten to send us straight through the looking glass." At the risk of praising the book, it can be compared to Rousseau's condemnation of modern society and praise of the noble savage in the First Discourse.