Maxine & Ernie & Net Delusions (Evgeny Morozov)

[ish mailian]

In BE, both positions, the sanguine take on the Internet, or Net
Delusions, as advanced by Maxine, and the Cold War take on the
Internet, one that attempts to trace the origins of the internet and
then project that historical reading on to 9-11 and an ongoing Cold
War, are satirized.

In Chapter 30 of BE, at the very start of that important chapter, what
I take to be an unfiltered voice of the implied author contrasts the
Newspaper of Record's propaganda  and the mediated narrative from
government, on television, with anarchism of cyberspace.

The cold war and ground zero are also contrasted with the event making
a clear statement, from the author about the positive anarchistic
cyber-narratives, some mad, some paranoid, but in sum, a positive
alternative, a counter-culture of loose and wild and freewheeling
stories that for a while anyway, as is always in Pynchon, for a brief
moment after crisis, in a zone, offer a living and organic counter to
the official propaganda and Orwellian control that will saturate the
networks in Prol Land.



On Thu, Mar 3, 2016 at 5:29 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> THE INTERNET ADVANCES the cause of freedom more effectively than
> ballistic missiles and Hellfire-equippeddrones; at least that’s the
> conventional wisdom among US diplomats and policymakers. “Information
> freedom supports the peace and security that provide a foundation for
> global progress” is how Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it in a
> speech last January, her first on democracy and the Internet. George
> W. Bush’s “freedom agenda” is out; the Twitter agenda is in.
> Unfortunately, this kind of technological romanticism relies on false
> historical analogies and sloppy thinking. Modern communications
> technologies are already being deployed as new forms of repression.
>
> http://www.wired.com/2010/12/st_essay_totalitarians/
>
> Net Delusions
>
> “The revolution will be Twittered!” declared journalist Andrew
> Sullivan after protests erupted in Iran. But as journalist and social
> commentator Evgeny Morozov argues in The Net Delusion, the Internet is
> a tool that both revolutionaries and authoritarian governments can
> use. For all of the talk in the West about the power of the Internet
> to democratize societies, regimes in Iran and China are as stable and
> repressive as ever. Social media sites have been used there to
> entrench dictators and threaten dissidents, making it harder—not
> easier—to promote democracy."
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk8x3V-sUgU
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l