
Counter-Histories of the Internet - ohjeez
https://www.publicbooks.org/counter-histories-of-the-internet/
======
lsiebert
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...](https://medium.com/@drjoy/why-im-firing-michigan-state-sexual-
harassment-online-harassment-and-utter-institutional-6663a6bde68e)

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...](https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/24/us/michigan-state-president-
resigns/index.html))

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](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.

------
bcaa7f3a8bbc
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._

------
ariehkovler
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.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_taxes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_taxes)

~~~
Mirioron
While it might have led to less bloated websites it would also have made the
internet far less important.

------
Fnoord
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?

~~~
goodmachine
Not sure what that has to do with the topic, but I think you mean pseudo.com -
there's a very entertaining documentary about it

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Live_in_Public](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Live_in_Public)

~~~
Fnoord
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").

[1]
[http://weliveinpublic.blog.indiepixfilms.com/](http://weliveinpublic.blog.indiepixfilms.com/)

~~~
goodmachine
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

