Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent

Douglas Coupland, one of the world's biggest cultural brains, takes an inside look at the global company that keeps us connected, and wonders what all that connectivity is doing to our brains and our sense of ourselves as humans.

The incomparable Douglas Coupland reports from inside the corporate offices and science labs of Alcatel-Lucent, a globally influential business whose work is largely unknown to consumers. "Were it to vanish tomorrow," he writes, "our modern world would grind to a halt. The Internet would implode--your Internet would implode." Although his examination of the company is playful and fascinating in its own right, Coupland's account is driven by his thoughtful reflections on the larger cultural and sociological significance of the transformative information technology Alcatel works on: fiber wire, microprocessors, the Internet and mobile technologies. And by a larger meditation about what the Internet is doing to us as it relentlessly colonizes the planet, and our brains.

Like Coupland's best work, Kitten Clone is a wildly entertaining yet penetrating encounter with the technological and cultural forces that surround us. And also a surprising and unique exploration of a possible future.