To the narrator's surprise, he finds that the gorilla, calling himself Ishmael, can communicate telepathically. At first baffled by this, the man learns the story of how the gorilla came to be here and soon accepts Ishmael as his teacher, regularly returning to Ishmael's office throughout the plot. The novel continues from this point mainly as a Socratic dialogue between Ishmael and his new student as they hash out what Ishmael refers to as "how things came to be this way" for mankind.

I would argue it's because Daniel Quinn is a fucktard.

Jeron Lanier is worth reading because the subjects he discusses have not been brought up by many people before and because his viewpoints are reasoned. That I arrived at different conclusions is far less important than the fact that it provoked me to examine the situation myself. Among his arguments:

- Music died with the invention of rap

- cultural fetishism will preserve artisan profits in an age of file sharing

- file structure and file hierarchy have doomed the human applicability of computing.

- Futurists' belief in the Singularity is perfectly parallel to Fundamentalists' belief in the Rapture

- MIDI is the worst.thing.evar

- VR will save you if only you aren't so selfish and stupid