1984 Foreword: Internet and social control

[Otto]

Says Alan Cohen, a V.P. of Airespace, a new Wi-Fi provider: "If I can
operate Google, I can find anything. And with wireless, it means I will be
able to find anything, anywhere, anytime. Which is why I say that Google,
combined with Wi-Fi, is a little bit like God. God is wireless, God is
everywhere and God sees and knows everything. Throughout history, people
connected to God without wires. Now, for many questions in the world, you
ask Google, and increasingly, you can do it without wires, too."
In other words, once Wi-Fi is in place, with one little Internet connection
I can download anything from anywhere and I can spread anything from
anywhere. That is good news for both scientists and terrorists,
pro-Americans and anti-Americans.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/opinion/29FRIE.html


Declaration on freedom of communication on the Internet (Strasbourg,
28.05.2003)
(Adopted by the Committee of Ministers at the 840th meeting of the
Ministers' Deputies)
The member states of the Council of Europe, Recalling the commitment of
member states to the fundamental right to freedom of expression and
information, as guaranteed by Article 10 of the Convention for the
Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms; Considering that
freedom of expression and the free circulation of information on the
Internet need to be reaffirmed; (...)
http://www.coe.int/T/E/Communication%5Fand%5FResearch/Press/News/2003/200305
28_declaration.asp

For me the problem is clear. People are concerned about
the controlling qualities of the internet. The internet can be
used for "good" or sinister purposes. Like a knife or the fire.

That technology can be abused the cyberpunks had learned
from Pynchon. Most of what they've written were orwellian-shaped
dystopias rather than utopias of cyberspace. So it seems as if in
this Stonehill was wrong in the first paragraph of his essay.

Then there's this "Incoming Mail"-thing (6.30 and 11.10-16) were
I believe that Weisenburger got it right that it's infantryman's slang
and "an occasion when the metaphor is literally fulfilled (...)
by V-2 express." (17). For Stonehill it's "a cybernetic sarcasm
for the target's view of artillery headed its way (...) less as a physical
object than as a packet of information." But it's both, a physical
object of destruction and information, and in bearing both potential
qualities it fulfills the infantryman's metaphor literally. It is clearly no
'cybernetic sarcasm'.

Otto