Category: Digital Rights

Nerve endings

The reason behind “how did we get here” […] is that the people who are regulating the Internet have mistaken the Internet — in this case — for a newspaper delivery service. And sometimes we get really dumb policies that mistake the Internet for a video-on-demand service, and sometimes for a jihadi recruiting tool, and sometimes for a pornography distribution system — and it is all of those things, because the Internet is the nervous system of the 21st century.

— Cory Doctorow at a #SaveTheLink live Q&A.

Television-Internet

Hossein Derakhshan, known as Iran’s Blogfather, warns of the ongoing cultural changes regarding the Web:

The stream, mobile applications, and moving images all show a departure from a books-internet toward a television-internet. We seem to have gone from a non-linear mode of communication – nodes and networks and links – toward one that is linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking.

Sometimes I think maybe I’m becoming too strict as I age. Maybe this is all a natural evolution of a technology. But I can’t close my eyes to what’s happening: a loss of intellectual power and diversity. In the past, the web was powerful and serious enough to land me in jail. Today it feels like little more than entertainment. So much that even Iran doesn’t take some – Instagram, for instance – serious enough to block.