It's rare that books about technology go much beyond describing the past, even though they usually purport to tell the future. Common subjects are the design of a computer or the evolution of a company, the origins of the Net or of research into virtual reality. Simple documentary stuff. It's a much riskier proposition to attempt to write with a bigger-picture view; you need a bold theory and the means to support your argument.

American academic and media theorist Siva Vaidhyanathan has that dramatic thesis: current technologies such as peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing and systems that sidestep copyright are just the latest incarnation of the age-old ideological battle between anarchy and oligarchy, resistance against authority versus attempts to establish autocratic control. In his new book, The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (Basic Books, $40), Vaidhyanathan analyzes the ways in which the individual power granted by information technology has led to confrontations with the ruling elite.

The author presents it all in terms of previous social struggles, and not solely those prompted by technological inventions. It sounds like an overreaching and grandiose way to discuss Napster and chat rooms--here comparing them to the role of gossip in turbulent 18th-century Paris--until you read the book. It contains an argument that is well-written, clear, and full of examples (from legal cases over software that defeats copyright protections to movie fans producing their own versions of films like Star Wars: The Phantom Menace ), and Vaidhyanathan builds his case very seductively. To him, battles over issues like P2P networking involve "values beyond commerce and crime, including free speech, privacy, and intellectual freedom".

It's clear that Vaidhyanathan's viewpoint is slanted toward supporting the rights of the individual over the corporations (his previous book is Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity ), but he acknowledges that total anarchy is unacceptable too. Whenever the wishes of the people are different than the systems they live under, the systems inevitably will be forced to undergo drastic change, and his stated goal is to prompt some intelligent debate in order to forestall a complete societal disruption. He believes there are ways to get through these changes without collapsing into a lawless state or enduring repressive attempts to legislate widespread behaviour out of existence.

Vaidhyanathan writes that this book was originally supposed to be about the control of digital information (in which case it would probably join a bunch of other ordinary books on that topic), but he claims that international events led him to embrace a bigger theory. "By 2004 the future of Metallica's fortune didn't matter much. My concerns moved to the regulation and control of all sorts of information, much of it cultural, much of it political." The result is a very smart and provocative work, a well-researched and skillfully delivered warning of the times to come.

From that big picture, let's move on to a more internal meditation, although one that's no less provocatively intellectual. How Images Think (MIT Press, $34.95), written by Ron Burnett, president of Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, is an analysis of images, particularly digital ones, and their power to communicate. But once again, the ordinary stuff you'd expect to find has been replaced with an insightful exploration of many bigger issues. Bravo.

For starters, How Images Think has a very open interpretation of what constitutes an image. Sure, photos and movies and TV shows are in there, but so are Web pages, software interfaces, games, animation, P2P networks, commonly used gadgets, and virtual environments. And Burnett goes a lot further than that: he talks about visualizing on-line communities, human consciousness, the physiological reactions of the brain to imagery as revealed through modern medical technology, even the ways that computer metaphors have infected our concepts of how our minds work. (Nobody used to think of their eyes as data-input devices in the old days.)

The problem in discussing this book is that it doesn't reduce well to a few simple descriptions. It's a detailed, personally narrated exploration that constantly surprises you. The chapter titles imply a series of superficially linked essays, but the words within immerse you in a journey that, well, "means that the newer technologies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are no longer just extensions of human abilities and needs; they are enlarging cultural and social preconceptions of the relationships between body and mind." The book is devoted to the implications of that concept and of the ways it is becoming built into our culture. Think of the role calculators now play, part of the human thinking process outsourced to a machine.

How Images Think is a bit hard to read. That's not because it's too professorial in tone (although it does use some unfamiliar words and scientific language), but being forced to think so hard is a real challenge. Your idea of what constitutes an image is the first thing to be exploded, then you keep looking up every few pages to mutter "Oh, wow," or "I've never thought of that." And, of course, if you just bought the book based on the title, you'd probably be surprised at how many subjects are discussed that don't relate directly to imagery. It's almost as much about social networking via electronics as anything, but all the myriad threads do combine into a big, uh, picture. In fact, the picture is so big that merely calling it How Images Think is almost an affront to the true contents within. Not that I have any better suggestions.