a review of [J M Balkin]'s [Cultural Software] ISBN:9780300084504 - Balkin's main problem is that of shared cultural meaning --- how it is that multiple people can share pieces of CultUre, and how this shared culture can change over time. Many proposed solutions have invoked supra-individual entities --- traditions, collective consciousnesses, Zeitgeisten, social totalities, cultures-as-such. Balkin rejects them all. He is too polite to their proposers to put it this way, but as explanations for collective phenomena, they are on all fours with saying that opium puts people to sleep because of its dormative virtue. Rather, as he puts it, the true solution is to be found below the level of the individual, rather than above it. It consists in taking his title quite literally. Computer software is information that instructs computers on how to process information. [Cultural Software] is information that changes how people process information.