Internet & social control

[pynchonoid]

Stonehill:
> The Internet came into being, let us not forget,
> first as ARPANET and then as DARPANET -- that is, as
> the U.S. Government Department of Defense's array of
> research communications links among its nuclear
> missile sites. The very circuits that signalled the
> Cold War's threats of annihilation now make up the
> benign and gossipy information superhighway, just as
> the colorful sign of God's promise to Man was
> suspended on drops of moisture left over from the
> Flood. >>
>

--- Malignd <malignd at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Not for the first time, Millison posts something
> which
> contradicts the argument he belabors, wishing the
> while there were facts to support it.  

Wrong.  I call attention to Stonehill's essay
precisely because it offers another POV.  It's one way
to keep a conversation going. Thanks for picking up on
it and keeping the conversation going -- at least
you've managed to stick more or less to the topic. 
 
> 
> His argument at bottom is built on two notions: (a)
> that, since there was military involvement, it was
> ipso facto sinister; and (b) Pynchon says so.  

No, three facts -- the Internet's tainted roots from
its Cold War paranoia and M.A.D. origins; current use
of the Internet by governments and corporations; the
Internet's potential for further abuse -- support
Pynchon's statement in the Foreword to _1984_. 
 
> (For further on this topic (for those not numbed),
> another, somewhat more nuanced, take on the Internet
> appears in Thomas Friedman's column on yesterday's
> NY
> Times op ed page.)

The more the merrier.  Friedman lacks Pynchon's wisdom
and style, of course.  F is a popular columnist,
certainly, and he definitely knows which side of his
bread is buttered -- he's a bootlicker.

Why the sensitivity and anxiety about the fact that
the Internet has  -- among all its other
chararacteristics -- the potential for Big
Brother-style social control that Pynchon notes?  Why
the need to marginalize Pynchon's view, which is
widely shared? 


<http://www.aclu.org/Privacy/PrivacyMain.cfm>
Privacy & Technology 
The United States is at risk of turning into a
full-fledged surveillance society.  There are
two simultaneous developments that are behind this
trend: 

*	The tremendous explosion in surveillance-enabling
technologies. Today, Orwell’s vision of “Big Brother”
is actually technologically possible.                
*	Even as this technological surveillance monster
grows in our midst, we are weaking the chains that
keep it from trampling our privacy – loosening checks
on government spying, watching passively as private
surveillance grows unchecked, and contemplating 
powerful new surveillance infrastructures that will
tie all this information together. 

The good news is that the drift toward a surveillance
society can be stopped.  Unfortunately, right now the
big picture is grim. [...] 
 




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

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