The suggestion that Joy Rankin has a rose colored view of academics is amusing, since I bought her book after reading her article on how Michigan State sucked so bad she quit, or as she put it, fired the university:
https://medium.com/@drjoy/why-im-firing-michigan-state-sexua...
Of course you may remember Michigan State from the US gymnast doctor Larry Nassar who molested a bunch of girls there even after concerns were raised about him, leading to the resignation of the University's President (https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/24/us/michigan-state-president-r...)
Anyway, I'm enjoying the book (still reading) but my take so far is that it's less a rose tinted view of academia as a whole, and more talking about how much good the people in academia who just wanted to make good computers/code/tools without trying to explicitly profit did for the internet and computing.
Honestly I think that's part of the hacker ethic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic) that it's easy to forget or undermine in the pursuit of profit. That we don't just want information to be free, we believe in sharing and making things better, even if it won't make us a dime or give us a nice bug bounty.
Anyway a worthwhile thought provoking article, to say the least.
I like the opening of this aricle. It almost mentioned all the interesting books about the folklore history of computing. All the books mentioned in this article are worth reading.
> Extant histories of the internet favor either heroic or deterministic narratives. On the determinist side, we have Paul Edwards’s The Closed World (1996), Fred Turner’s Democratic Surround (2013) and From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006), John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said (2006), and others that describe the internet as the result of collisions between large-scale Cold War policies or zeitgeists. With some variations, these narratives portray the digital revolution as born from the improbable marriage of countercultural hippie experiments and the military-industrial complex.
> On the heroic, individualist side, we have Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984), Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon’s Where Wizards Stay Up Late (1996), Michael Hiltzik’s Dealers of Lightning (1999), Walter Isaacson’s Innovators (2014) and Steve Jobs (2011), Leslie Berlin’s Troublemakers (2017), and Adam Fischer’s Valley of Genius (2018), whose titles speak for themselves. Histories in this genre extoll the whimsical personalities and talents of digital entrepreneurs and inventors, of whom Jobs is the prime exemplar. Some do acknowledge the contingencies that facilitated the rise of these digital “geniuses.” But overall, they tend to represent Silicon Valley as a titanic battleground that proved the superior mettle of its winners. Both extremes are tempting in their clarity; both make for a gripping story. Occasionally—as in Liza Mundy’s Code Girls (2017) or Margot Shetterly’s Hidden Figures (2016)—a simultaneously individualist and Marxist approach unveils underappreciated digital counter-heroes.
Interesting. I remember in the 90s there was a lot of talk about introducing a "Bit Tax" as a way for governments to raise revenue from the newly-mainstream Internet. There was also debate about an email tax.
The wikipedia piece has some more background on how these options never happened, but they'd have surely shaped the development of the Internet and maybe led to less-bloated websites.
Wasn't there some kind of art project by a rich millionaire in the end of the '90s/start of '00s which was kind of like a hacker space, but everything was recorded with cameras? Does anyone remember the name of it?
Yep, that's it, and that's the documentary I've seen on it as well.
Here is why I find it relevant.
The article starts with:
> What could the internet have been? [...]
That's what the article is basically about.
Now, let me quote about the documentary:
> The film’s website describes how, “With Quiet: We Live in Public, Harris proved how, in the affiliate future of standard life online, we will willingly trade our privacy for the connection and peer recognition we all deeply desire. Through his experiments, including another six-month stint living under 24-hour home security camera systems online which led him to experience nervous breakdown symptoms. Josh Harris displayed the demonstration effect of the price we will all pay for living in public.” [1]
The art project we discuss proves that the way it has become (privacy-wise) was inevitable because people are willing to make that trade off. "The cloud", Facebook, and recently Facebook paying kids 20 USD to install a "VPN" (Onava) on their phone logging everything are just one of the many examples of that.
It needn't have gone that way, if we learned earlier from that documentary and applied legislation. We can still learn and adapt, if we vote for electorate who don't listen to the big money (basically, the "cloud providers").
I'm pretty sure you can't legislate against narcissism/voyeurism, which are flipsides of the same coin.
The tech just made the magic mirror globally accessible, pocket-sized and always-on, and the business model (ad-sponsored) just made it free. We have 'corporate voyeurs' as a result, but for that kind of thinking Guy Debord was more pointed than the pseudo.com guy IMHO
Of course you may remember Michigan State from the US gymnast doctor Larry Nassar who molested a bunch of girls there even after concerns were raised about him, leading to the resignation of the University's President (https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/24/us/michigan-state-president-r...)
Anyway, I'm enjoying the book (still reading) but my take so far is that it's less a rose tinted view of academia as a whole, and more talking about how much good the people in academia who just wanted to make good computers/code/tools without trying to explicitly profit did for the internet and computing.
Honestly I think that's part of the hacker ethic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic) that it's easy to forget or undermine in the pursuit of profit. That we don't just want information to be free, we believe in sharing and making things better, even if it won't make us a dime or give us a nice bug bounty.
Anyway a worthwhile thought provoking article, to say the least.