Rebecca MacKinnon: Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom (2012)

Google has a history of censoring at the behest of Communist China. Research in Motion happily opens up the BlackBerry to such stalwarts of liberty as Saudi Arabia. Yahoo has betrayed the email accounts of dissidents to the PRC. Facebook’s obsession with personal transparency has revealed the identities of protestors to governments. For all the overheated rhetoric of liberty and cyber-utopia, it is clear that the corporations that rule cyberspace are making decisions that show little or no concern for their impact on political freedom. In Consent of the Networked, internet policy specialist Rebecca MacKinnon argues that it’s time for us to demand that our rights and freedoms are respected and protected before they’re sold, legislated, programmed, and engineered away. The challenge is that building accountability into the fabric of cyberspace demands radical thinking in a completely new dimension. The corporations that build and operate the technologies that create and shape our digital world are fundamentally different from the Chevrons, Nikes, and Nabiscos whose behavior and standards can be regulated quite effectively by laws, courts, and bureaucracies answerable to voters.The public revolt against the sovereigns of cyberspace will be useless if it focuses downstream at the point of law and regulation, long after the software code has already been written, shipped, and embedded itself into the lives of millions of people. The revolution must be focused upstream at the source of the problem. Political innovation—the negotiated relationship between people with power and people whose interests and rights are affected by that power—needs to center around the point of technological conception, experimentation, and early implementation.The purpose of technology—and of the corporations that make it—is to serve humanity, not the other way around. It’s time to wake up and act before the reversal becomes permanent.

Publisher Basic Books, 2012
ISBN 0465024424, 9780465024421
352 pages

review (Adam Thierer, Technology Liberation Front)
review (John Kampfner, The Guardian)

Let’s take back the Internet! (author’s TED talk)
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Philippe Aigrain: Sharing: Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age (2012)

In the past fifteen years, file sharing of digital cultural works between individuals has been at the center of a number of debates on the future of culture itself. To some, sharing constitutes piracy, to be fought against and eradicated. Others see it as unavoidable, and table proposals to compensate for its harmful effects. Meanwhile, little progress has been made towards addressing the real challenges facing culture in a digital world.

Sharing: Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age offers a counterpoint to the dominant view that file sharing is piracy, analyzing it rather as the modern form of long recognized rights to share in culture. Sharing starts from a radically different viewpoint, namely that the non-market sharing of digital works is both legitimate and useful. Philippe Aigrain looks at the benefits of file sharing, which allows unknown writers and artists to be appreciated more easily. It supports this premise with empirical research, demonstrating that non-market sharing leads to more diversity in the attention given to various works.

Concentrating not only on the cultural enrichment caused by widely shared digital media, Sharing also discusses new financing models that would allow works to be shared freely by individuals without aim at profit. Aigrain carefully balances the needs to support and reward creative activity with a suitable respect for the cultural common good and proposes a new interpretation of the digital landscape.

With contribution of Suzanne Aigrain
Publisher Amsterdam University Press
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND License
ISBN 9789089643858
244 pages

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Rethinking Marxism 22-3: Special Issue on the Common and the Forms of the Commune (2010)

“Operating within and beyond each of the offerings contained in the pages [of this special issue] is a profound play on precisely the question posed: What is the operative notion of the common today? Even the singularity of that question’s basic assumption is challenged by the scope of these inquiries for, indeed, a paradox begins to emerge when we consider them as a collection, one might even say as a common production of knowledge: recognition that the very foundation of a concept of the common—its particularity—may well be articulated in a multiplicity of ways. That is to say, can postmodernity—or whatever we wish to designate our present condition—tolerate a single “operative notion” of the common, or does it rather demand a constellation of understandings that contribute simultaneously to our experience of the common and to its neoliberal other, the promotion of individuation?” (from Introduction)

Contributions by Anna Curcio & Ceren Özselçuk, Jack Amariglio, Michael Hardt, Gigi Roggero, Aras Özgün, 16beaver group, Antonio Callari & David F. Ruccio, Deborah Jenson, Federico Luisetti, S. Charusheela, Kenneth Surin, Kathi Weeks, Anna Curcio, Yahya M. Madra & Ceren Özselçuk, Alvaro Reyes.

With Introduction by Joseph Childers
Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society Volume 22 Issue 3
ISSN: 0893-5696

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