Still Nabokov-free WAS Re: NN Gibson re Orwell

[pynchonoid]

Yes, Internet service delivery is complex, as is the
infrastructure beneath.  That complexity hasn't,
doesn't, and won't prevent governments and
corporations from using the Internet for social
control in various forms, however. "Decentralization",
perhaps on a purely technical level, but, from its
inception, a network that was designed to keep power
in the hands of the government, and, later as the
Internet became commercialized, the corporations that
implemented it.  

It seems the Ministry of Truth has been quite
successful in promulgating the myth of the
cybercowboy, running wild and free on the information
frontier, when in fact Internet traffic can be -- and
is, in some cases -- monitored by any determined
government.

See the book _Firebrands: Building Brand Loyalty in
the Internet Age_ (by Michael Moon and Doug Millison,
yes that's me) for a detailed road map that
corporations follow to induce specific forms of
customer behavior -- another important form of social
control.

Of course government and corporate control of the
Internet is not yet absolute or complete, and may
never achieve such, but the fact that people who want
to keep their efforts secret have to take increasingly
difficult and onerous measures in order to evade
Internet security would seem to testify to the
seriousness of the challenge. The proof's in the
pudding.  Virtually every government currently uses
the Internet to investigate or track all kinds of
"criminal" or otherwise prohibited activities.  If
that's not a form of social control, I don't know what
you'd call it. Corporate uses of the Internet are
varied and disturbing, if you take the time to look
into what sorts of information are being gathered and
what uses they serve.

Gibson is typical of his contemporaries, caught up in
the romance of the Internet, believing that something
special about this particular technical achievement is
somehow going to avoid being exploited by those in
powr for their own advantage.  Pynchon knows better.



--- Jasper Fidget <jasper at hatguild.org> wrote: 
> This is terribly simplistic and inaccurate.  [...] 

pynchonoid:
> > You don't know what you're talking about it. Fact
> is,
> > the Internet is controlled by corporations, which
> are
> > licensed by governments to manage and implement
> the
> > various software and hardware systems that are the
> > Internet.



=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.org/>

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