Found in 2 comments on Hacker News
CamperBob2 · 2025-09-19 · Original thread
It's hard to miss the similarity between your book's title and Cliff Stoll's 1995 Silicon Snake Oil, an indictment of the general concept of the "information superhighway" that was starting to resonate with the public. Stoll is a really smart guy, but that particular book hasn't held up too well:

   Few aspects of daily life require computers...They're     irrelevant to cooking, driving, visiting, negotiating,     eating, hiking, dancing, speaking, and gossiping. You     don't need a computer to...recite a poem or say a     prayer." Computers can't, Stoll claims, provide a richer    or better life. 
(excerpted from the Amazon summary at https://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Snake-Oil-Thoughts-Informatio... ).

So, was this something that you guys were conscious of when you chose your own book's title? How well have you future-proofed your central thesis?

pseudolus · 2019-12-19 · Original thread
His follow-up book "Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway" was also a great read [0]. It's a shame that collectively we couldn't heed some of his warnings about the hype we were being sold about the Internet. In many ways the future he hinted at turned out to be substantially worse than he predicted.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385419945/ref=dbs_a_def_r...