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)
author
publisher
google books

PDF (EPUB)
Afterword to the Paperback Edition (HTML, added on 2013-4-19)

Lisa Nakamura, Peter Chow-White (eds.): Race After the Internet (2011)

“In Race After the Internet, Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White bring together a collection of interdisciplinary essays exploring the complex role that digital media technologies play in shaping our ideas about race. Contributors interrogate changing ideas of race within the context of an increasingly digitally mediatized cultural and informational landscape. Using social scientific, rhetorical, textual, and ethnographic approaches, these essays show how new and old styles of race as code, interaction, and image are played out within digital networks of power and privilege.

Race After the Internet includes essays on the shifting terrain of racial identity and its connections to social media technologies like Facebook and MySpace, popular online games like World of Warcraft, YouTube and viral video, WiFi infrastructure, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, genetic ancestry testing, and DNA databases in health and law enforcement. Contributors also investigate the ways in which racial profiling and a culture of racialized surveillance arise from the confluence of digital data and rapid developments in biotechnology. This collection aims to broaden the definition of the “digital divide” in order to convey a more nuanced understanding of access, usage, meaning, participation, and production of digital media technology in light of racial inequality.”

Contributors: danah boyd, Peter Chow-White, Wendy Chun, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Troy Duster, Anna Everett, Rayvon Fouché, Alexander Galloway, Oscar Gandy, Eszter Hargittai, Jeong Won Hwang, Curtis Marez, Tara McPherson, Alondra Nelson, Christian Sandvig, Ernest Wilson.

Publisher Taylor and Francis, 2011
ISBN 0415802369, 9780415802369
352 pages

Review: Patti (Reviews in Cultural Theory, 2012).

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-12-26)

Pool (2011-2012)

“Pool is a platform dedicated to expanding and improving the discourse between online and offline realities and their cultural, societal and political impact on each other.”

Contributors: Absis Minas, Andreas Ervik, Andrew Norman Wilson, Ann Hirsch, Anne de Vries, Billy Rennekamp, Bunny Rogers, Caitlin Denny, Casey A. Von Gollan, Constant Dullaart, Daniel G. Baird, Devin Kenny, Duncan Malashock, Erik Stinson, Eugene Kotlyarenko, Gene McHugh, Ginger Scott, Harry Burke, Isabel Gylling & Matthew Ferguson, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Jennifer Chan, Jimmy Chen, Joanne McNeil, Jordan Tate, Joshua Simon, Karen Archey, Kate Steciw, Katja Novitskova, Leo Merz, Louis Doulas, Marisa Olson, Martin Jaeggi, Nicholas O’Brien, Patrick Armstrong, Riyo Nemeth, Robert John, Robert Lorayn, Ry David Bradley, Ryan Barone, Samuel Riviere, Sofia Leiby, Timur Si-Qin, Tom Moody, Wyatt Niehaus

Editor: Louis Doulas
Contributing editors: Absis Minas, Ria Roberts, Sofia Leiby
PDF design: Rasmus Svensson
Pool can easily be physically distributed and stocked at any gallery, shop, library, etc. by simply downloading each month’s PDF issue and printing.

Magazine website

PDF (June 2011, updated on 2017-12-2)
PDF (July 2011, updated on 2017-12-2)
PDF (August 2011, updated on 2017-12-2)
PDF (September 2011, updated on 2017-12-2)
PDF (October 2011, updated on 2017-12-2)
PDF / HTML (November 2011, updated on 2017-12-2)
HTML (December 2011, updated on 2017-12-2)
PDF (May 2012, added on 2017-12-2)