Maxine & Ernie & Net Delusions (Evgeny Morozov)

[Robert Mahnke]

Morozov reviewed Bleeding Edge favorably:

http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/themen/evgeny-morozov-reads-pynchon-s-bleeding-edge-the-deepest-of-webs-12572137.html


On Thu, Mar 3, 2016 at 3:10 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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