I don't thin your comment is "middlebrow" at all. I came to the end of the article confused as well. My guess is at Lanier is, in some sense, "all over the place", and the writer didn't really know how to pull it all together into a coherent picture of Lanier.

Regardless, there wasn't a single argument in the article that I would call cogent. That doesn't mean Lanier doesn't have cogent arguments (I really don't know); just that they didn't come through in this piece.