MADreads

Who controls my life?

June 29th, 2007 Jon - Central Library

Well, the United States government controls the Internet part, apparently.  Perhaps this should be cause for concern, given Senator Ted Stevens’s much-maligned “series of tubes” comment.

Who Controls the Internet? examines the ways in which the electronic frontier is closing.  It’s a fascinating history of how we got from “visions of a post-territorial order” to a world where national governments across the world, from the United States to China, successfully use direct and indirect pressure to monitor and influence our virtual interactions.

I like searching the library catalog online, and I’ve bought all kinds of things from online shopping sites like Amazon.com. Perhaps these activities wouldn’t be possible without government control, but I have a lot of sympathy for early philosophers of the Internet, who thought that limitless democracy and complete human freedom were necessary consequences of the way it was constructed.  It’s clear now that the Internet will not be necessarily free or necessarily controlled, but that, instead, we have to choose the kind of virtual world we want to live in.

Entry Filed under: Nonfiction