This is an occasionally interesting bridge between the American transcendentalists (e.g., Thoreau and Emerson) and those who embrace technology. I enjoyed the first two thirds of the narrator's backstory, especially the ways in which it intertwined with the present-tense road trip. There are several great passages about troubleshooting and the mindset that one needs for it, but on the down side, there are some really long and boring passages about the narrator's fixation on rhetoric and the early Greek philosophers, and it turns out that the relationship between Phaedrus and the narrator doesn't offer any kind of real payoff. Meh.