“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”
This quote from John Perry’s manifesto titled “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” was brilliantly written ahead of its time, in 1996 when the internet was still a relatively novel form of media available to the public, long before social media websites like Facebook or Twitter even existed. By asking governments to “leave us alone”, it seems as though Perry could foresee the huge role that cyberspace would later come to play in politics and in shaping national conversations. (The Arab Spring comes to mind.)
In the ‘Consent of the Networked’, Rebecca MacKinnon discusses the worldwide struggle for internet freedom that is playing before our eyes today. While acknowledging that different groups of people possess different political loyalties and likewise possess varying opinions towards the idea of internet freedom, she nevertheless urges ‘netizens’ to be “more prepared” and aware of their responsibilities and safety both online and off. Throughout her book, MacKinnon seems to be communicating that the biggest crime is not that a plethora of “criminals, pedophiles, bullies, industrial spies, racists, terrorists and others… have extended their activities into cyberspace”, but rather that we we remain blissfully ignorant while our online rights (which bleed into our physical freedoms), are being “sold, legislated, programmed, and engineered away”.
It is time for us to hold corporates accountable for the human rights implications of their business software and engineering choices, and address the urgent question of how technology should be governed, so that we may eventually build a “real networked commons”.
JELS of our Global Politicking Prowess 