I am Googlebot. I control the Earth. – Paul Ford writes about Google and the Semantic Web. Also good: Internet Culture Review, and ReichOS, the latter which has unfortunatele, become increasingly relevant and likely:
Networks, because they can track your motions, can just as easily be used as tools to manipulate and control individuals, to abridge freedoms, to catch people. It’s important, to me, to remember that the decentralized nature of the Internet is a side-effect of its technical and design goals, not an innate feature placed there so that 20-somethings can build data havens off Singapore. The freedoms allowed by this medium were an accident, a by-product of the needs of the government and the defense industry. A calculated move, a well-placed bill in the US House and Senate with European support, a sniffing and monitoring system plugged into all our wires, all put together “for the good of the people” by government and industry, could abridge our sudden, surprising networked freedoms – to publish as we see fit, to read what we will, from many parts of the world, to use the network protocols we choose – in moments, and those freedoms need never come back.
People used to say that the Internet would re-route around these changes. I think empircal evidence has by and large silenced most of those voices. It’s not a lost cause, but the best time to act is yesterday. Now will have to do, I suppose.