The Great Seduction

When Anonymous Protest Goes Too Far

The future has arrived in the form of a virtual political network that could have stepped out of a dystopian William Gibson piece of science fiction. "We are everywhere, we are everyone. We are Anonymous," boasted a member of Anonymous, the self-appointed defenders of WikiLeaks and of Internet freedom, in an online interview earlier this week with the Economist.

Anonymous offers a warning about the future of radical political protest in the digital age of radical transparency. And, for those who value political accountability and responsibility, Anonymous is as chilling as one of Gibson's bleakest visions.

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Keen On Tim Ferriss

Tim Ferriss is one of the world’s leading transcenders of limitations. Best known as the author of the 2007 monstrously successful self-help guide The 4-Hour Workweek, a #1 New York Times and #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller that has accumulated over 1000 reviews on Amazon, the Princeton-educated and globe-trotting Ferriss is also a legendary bodybuilder, life hacker and re-inventor of the physical self.

According to Ferriss, modern man is driven by two great fears:

1) Too much email.
2) Getting fat.

So it’s no great surprise that Ferriss’ follow-up to The 4-Hour Workweek is The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman, which gets released tomorrow. While his first book was a guide to overcoming too much email, Ferris’ latest work is a guide to overcoming the limitations of the physical body. It’s a hacking guide to the body – a book which encourages us to treat our bodies as entrepreneurial start-ups that require continual innovation and reinvention in order to fully realize ourselves and, of course, lose weight.

For those of you with sexually demanding girlfriends or wives, The 4-Hour Body should easily provide the ROI on its $27 cover price. As Ferriss explained to me when he came into the TechCrunch studio, not only is his new book a step-by-step guide to becoming super-human, but it also offers a detailed anatomical and logistical guide about to how to give women 15-minute orgasms (clue: focus, focus, focus – and no kissing.)

Essential reading, indeed. No doubt, The 4-Hour Body will emulate the 4-Hour Workweek as the #1 book on both men and women’s bedside tables this Xmas.