The Blind Giant Read Online Free PDF

cellphone network and the twenty-four-hour news channels which rarely have much more to tell us at five thirty than they did at five or four or three – is a part of us, just as the football field, the economy-class cabin of an aeroplane and the green room of a television studio are aspects of our lives. There are simple historical reasons why we tend to think of computer-mediated communications as a separate place, but the separation is a false one. What occurs online is a reflection of what occurs offline, though it often occurs much faster and much more publicly, and it is less ephemeral: the memory of computers lasts as long as anyone can be bothered to maintain it.
    Looking back, the enthusiasm and idealism of the Internet’s arrival in the public awareness seems similar to the wild, magnificent fantasies of space colonization in the mid-1970s, which dovetailed high science, post oil-crisis resource worries and ecological concerns.NASA design studies and countercultural re-imaginings of human life came together in plans for toroidal space stations and rich, comic-book-style illustrations of cylinders in space, open-plan, park-filled orbitals serviced by a commuter version of the Space Shuttle or perhaps a Space Elevator. The images generated at NASAAmes Research Center are a mix of eco-utopian frontier town and suburban grid-system living, a kind of perpetual space-going America, with the best view in the solar system. It seems that we – modern industrial societies – have a slight cultural claustrophobia, a need to get up and out of our lives and away to ‘somewhere else’ where life is less restrictive and where the liens of history and existing law weigh less heavily upon us. In 1975 that was space. By 1995 it wascyberspace: the infinite, lawless, playful world behind the screen.
    When governments and corporations at last woke up to what was happening and tried to enforce ‘real world’ laws, it was as if lawyers had walked into private houses during Sunday lunch and started demanding that everyone pay for using the cutlery. The arrival of sheriffs and Pinkertons on the digital frontier was the start of a conflict of law and ideology that continues to this day. The assertion of national and corporate power – often in aggressive ways as officials and business affairs departments raced to preserve their authority and their bottom line – created an online resistance. As well it might; it is very hard, in drawing up legislation to deal with the Internet, to avoid legislating broadly about human life. Attempts to curtail undesirable behaviour which is conducted through the embedded and ubiquitous communications medium of the Net almost inevitably cannot be restricted to a single venue. Legislation about the Internet almost inevitably becomes legislation about everything, because the Net is everywhere.

    The promise and rhetoric of the Internet as given in the 1990s – when it ceased to be part of the on-campus life of specialists and met the wider world – was of open systems, free speech, individual privacy and governmental transparency. The electronic realm would be the crucible in which the physical one was remade. An untouchable refuge for revolution and experiment, the Net was the venue where anything that was suppressed could be given voice. Creativity would no longer be locked in old corporate patterns but opened up to everyone. The gatekeepers of the existing cultural order – publishers, music executives, newspaper barons – would be bypassed or inundated, and new voices and new identities would find their expression. The ownership of the means of creation, to put it in Marxian terms, would no longer rest solely with established power structures. The digital cottage industry could and would compete with the big boys onequal terms. In 1998 Microsoft’sBill Gates told writerKen Auletta that he wasn’t worried about challenges from regular companies, but rather from someone working on something