If you have the time and interest, check out The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler. It's a much better and thoughtful piece—and of course, much longer.

tl;dr?

Hard to read incoherent self serving rambling which insults the name of Machiavelli.

http://www.unt.edu/honors/eaglefeather/2007_Issue/kniatt6.sh... "Machiavelli’s The Prince as a Satire: An Exploratory Look at Machiavelli’s Works to Determine His True Political Inclinations"

Wonderful, thank you very much.

I love Discourses - it is some of most insightful and inspiring writings ever. I feel sad for people who just read The Prince and then dedicated their career towards analyzing Machiavelli's motives and tarnishing the name of Nicollo, while in reality making fools of themselves.

For the record: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095855

Also as a shameless plug, I have realized that The Prince is a tongue in cheek piece even before reading The Discourses.

"Globalization, social networks, massive change taking place. Blah blah blah"

About as stereotypically Harvard a piece I've seen. It's similar to what one may observe in the wild when birds puff up their bellies to look intimidating. While it may impress a mate or scare off a potential predator, keen wildlife observers know it's just a show.

The substance of the piece did not justify its volume.