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The Internet is at exactly this phase. The same channels that carry our emails, our tweets, our music, are also the channels that carry executable code — whether for the network itself, or for our re-programmable endpoints. And we wouldn’t want it any other way — it’s meant to be a civic technology. If you tried to have a computer that couldn’t be reprogrammed at all, from afar? It wouldn’t be a computer anymore, and that starts to point towards some of the solutions coming out as this [bypassing technological control mechanisms] problem is getting worse and worse — and as business models are shaping up more and more for the exploitation of these endpoints, and for having zombie armies.
— Jonathan Zittrain, “Civic Technologies and the Future of the Internet.” Presentation, 2009. The oven-mitt approach to the Internet as a tool.
This is the best articulation (albeit, long, in that way that academics can be sometimes) of the fears expressed around the time the iPad was released. Goes a little further than simply rejecting tools that we can’t control. Instead, it talks about the historical precedents for balancing powers — in Zittrain’s terms, the “civic defense systems” for civic technologies.
This is the best articulation (albeit, long, in that way that academics can be sometimes) of the fears expressed around the time the iPad was released. Goes a little further than simply rejecting tools that we can’t control. Instead, it talks about the historical precedents for balancing powers — in Zittrain’s terms, the “civic defense systems” for civic technologies.
(Source: youtube.com)
