The Pattern of Decentralization-Centralization

There are two categories of true believers, in my mind. There are those who, for example, are building a new decentralized user-empowering financial system. And to them, history teaches us that there will always be new avenues for power to become centralized. In fact, the entire history of the computer industry was radical openness, which led to a lot of innovation, which later led to closing it down. For example, IBM released the PC specs. Everybody could build a PC. Michael Dell was a col...

 The Effort in Keeping the Internet Clean

Contract workers in San Francisco, processing thousands of complaints a day. Sweatshops in the Philippines, where outsourced labor decides what’s obscene and what’s permissible in a matter of seconds. Teams of anti-spam engineers in Mountain View, adapting to the latest wave of bots. An unpaid moderator on Reddit, picking out submissions that violate guidelines. So much of the internet is garbage, and much of its infrastructure and many work hours are devoted to taking out the garbage. For t...

 The Myth of the Solitary Villain

The more sophisticated and powerful a technology, the more people are needed to weaponize it. And the more people needed to weaponize it, the more societal controls work to defuse, or soften, or prevent harm from happening. I add one additional thought. Even if you had a budget to hire a team of scientists whose job it was to develop a species-extinguishing bio weapon, or to take down the internet to zero, you probably still couldn’t do it. That’s because hundreds of thousands of man-years of...

 The Unfeeling Space of the Internet Makes Us Prize Physic...

Before the Internet, I made more trips to the library and more phone calls. I read more books and my point of view was narrower and less informed. I walked more, biked more, hiked more, and played more. I made love more often. [...] How has the Internet changed my thinking? The more I’ve loved and known it, the clearer the contrast, the more intense the tension between a physical life and a virtual life. The Internet stole my body, now a lifeless form hunched in front of a glowing screen....

 The Web as a Liberal Artefact

A final point briefly worth making is that the Web is a space designed to let information flow, and to create opportunities for cooperation and collaboration. It is worth asking why freer information flow is a good thing, and the answers are pretty straightforward. It is good to have the freedom to express oneself in order that one can pursue one's own autonomous and authentic projects. Unhindered criticism of governments and other power centres tends to lead to better governance; information...

 We Delude Ourselves with Metaphors About the Internet

We are beholden to countless Internet fantasies: It's quicker than the speed fo ligth; it appears and dissolves at whim; it's guarded by big strapping men friendly to our own interests and hostile to the interests of others; it's magical, evanescent, as portable as our own bodies and imaginations; it looks like a swirling hypercoller tie-dyed video game. These are, of course, also common fantasies about capitalism. But the ultimate fantasy of being online, echoed in much writing about the Int...

 Generation @ is Not the Cultural Revolution Predicted

In purely statistical terms, it appears that ever-greater proportions of young people's days are focused on technology. According to a recent study carried out by the Stuttgart-based media research group MPFS, 98 percent of 12- to 19-year-olds in Germany now have access to the Internet. And by their own estimates, they are online for an average of 134 minutes a day -- just three minutes less than they spend in front of the television. However, the raw figures say little about what these supp...