Book Review: Consent of the Networked

[JackLuis]

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom

By Rebecca MacKinnon

In her timely new book, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom, Rebecca MacKinnon, a former journalist and current fellow at the New America Foundation, offers a sharp, sobering rebuttal to such heady rhetoric, questioning and complicating our understandings of what it means to be free online. For many in the United States, the recent SOPA/PIPA battle, which prompted a huge amount of attention to the politics of the web, will be an obvious reference point—but Consent of the Networked makes clear that it was just one part of an ongoing struggle over the Internet as a political terrain. MacKinnon's book presents a cogent picture of the many ways in which our lives, both online and off, are increasingly affected by regulators, politicians, and companies seeking to carve territories into the still-amorphous web.

While the Internet offers new tools for freedom or repression, the basic political questions at stake are old ones, and it’s a quote not from Clay Shirky or Cory Doctorow but Alexis de Tocqueville that sums up the fear at the heart of the book: "if despotism were to be established amongst the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them." The most worrying scenario MacKinnon conjures is not an Orwellian world of Big Brother censorship, but one more along the lines of that envisioned by Aldous Huxley, in which "our desire for security, entertainment, and material comfort is manipulated to the point where we all voluntarily and eagerly submit to subjugation." Indeed, as sobering as accounts of overt state surveillance and violence in Syria and Russia are, perhaps most ominous is the type of censorship practiced in China, in which the government state restricts access to sites it deems threatening—but allows Chinese companies to create government-approved versions, trapping citizens in a "gilded cage" that keeps them engaged but not enraged.

A very good review of the issues and constructive suggestions for the opportunities of the Net-izin community.

 

[sr71plt]

One could also view the freedom of the Internet as filling our lives with a bunch of made-up and unverified crap that makes the relevant and verified that much harder to see.

 

[JackLuis]

One could also view the freedom of the Internet as filling our lives with a bunch of made-up and unverified crap that makes the relevant and verified that much harder to see.

No doubt. When you open a broadband channel you expect noise interfering with the desired signal. It just requires the necessary filters to separate the noise from the music of the spheres.

Sort of like the bullshit filters necessary to listen to the Repugnicans.