Business and government are sharing more and more information about each of us, thereby raising InfoTech ethical quandaries that find us unprepared.

Major car rental companies, for example, have begun to use electronic links to government computers to check driving records of potential renters. They are turning away 6 to 10 percent, although rental clerks are not given any details to share with rejected applicants. A puzzled or offended driver who wants to complain is referred to the State Motor Vehicle Bureau. There a low-level bureaucrat explains no one has a right to rent a car. Nor is there any right to have the contested rejection explained, or to secure proof that there has been no computer error...a situation readers of Kafka would find wryly familiar.

Anyone made nervous by the fact that giant credit agencies, amoral government agencies, and other snoops are busy creating an electronic dossier on millions of us will get no comfort from this jeremiad.

Indeed, when the Information Superhighway and the merger of TV, PC, fax, and phone are yesterday's news, perhaps by 2005 or before, powerful forces (marketers, social engineers, etc.) are likely to possess an extraordinary ability to sort us out according to our perceived value in the marketplace and our assumed susceptibility to various political messages.

Convinced this double-barreled prospect threatens our minds and souls as do few other hazards of the InfoTech Age, Gandy, Jr., traces fascinating links among telemarketing, mail surveys, focus interviews, and other sorting and surveillance tools.

These links are condemned for promoting a panoptic future that does not engender trust and community, but pushes us instead further away from our democratic ideals. (The term "panoptic" was first applied by Jeremy Bentham to a prison he designed that warders with complete and endless surveillance of their inmates).

A work in critical theory, the book draws on such leading theorists as Jurgen Habermas, Jacques Ellul, Max Weber, Michel Foucault, and other unsparing critics of technology. Often complex and sometimes turgid, they are rendered "reader friendly" by the author's considerable writing skills.

This is not to suggest the book is a light or easy read: Quite the contrary. It is packed with demanding information, challenging with fresh ideas, and vexing with its thoroughgoing indictment of a "sorting mechanism /that/ cannot help but exacerbate the massive and destructive inequalities that characterize the U.S. political economy...."

Readers who expect social critics to offer engaging reform ideas after laying out a major problem will learn as early as page 2 that Gandy, Jr., has no such intent. Instead, with unsparing honesty he exposes weaknesses in various reforms popular with those desperate to believe the panoptic sort can readily be tamed and transformed.

Paradoxically, by firmly denying this wishful possibility, he makes a case for mounting new efforts to expose, oppose, and replace the system he sees unfolding: "My project is not the lion's roar, just a tiny rent in the screen. There is much more to be seen. Make a hole for yourself, or help me to widen the one that I have already begun."

Palliatives, of course, only earn the author's scorn, as, for example, calls for creation of a Sort-defying "buffer" between individuals and marketers.

As explained by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers (N.Y.Times, August 22,1993) we could urge or even require media companies to expunge the identity of individuals before they could sell sales data gathered about them through media-use analysis to eager marketers Sales offers could then be made to prospective buyers only within the media company's own interactive system. Consumer-viewers could use interactive systems to publicize what they wanted to purchase, knowing they could get back marketer "bids" without having to reveal their identities.

Clever and promising, this reform sidesteps the underlying question of appropriate limits on data gathering per se, the dark heart of the Panoptic Sort Challenge.

Those made anxious by the voracious appetite of power elites for gathering information about most of us, and those reluctant to blindly embrace InfoTech, will find much of value in this harrowing critique of a "high-tech cybernetic triage." Few books so effectively execrate the "all-seeing eye of the difference machine that guides the global capitalist system," its awesome data sorting mechanism.

Thoroughly alarming, this book offers a healthy counter to the rosy picture of cybernetic capitalism painted by George Gilder, Fortune, and other sources of technological optimism. Much as cyberpunk literature forces readers to consider a chilling realm of InfoTech possibilities, its unsparing diatribe forces us to confront the shriveled-soul realm the public will inherit unless we soon find effective ways to regulate the Sort.

The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information by Oscar H. Gandy, Jr. (Westview Press: 1993). 269pp., $21.00.