Institute of Network Cultures | Christopher Kelty: The Internet We Could Have Had

"And “openness” today has become boring but essential to the massive economy of social media, which has monetized engagement based on the use of open source software and a sophisticated system of data tracking and transaction processing. Today “openness” is more likely to be experienced as part of the neoliberal managerial borg than it is the more radical liberation of knowledge for the people. Today, libgen and scihub are the open access we could have had. ... There were many who would have liked to make the internet more like the dreams of Ted Nelson or Douglas Engelbart, many who would build the Victorian Web or the Perseus Digital Library of ancient Greek and Roman texts. The internet would be epochal like the printing press and the invention of writing; it was the end of the book, as no shortage of breathless books was paradoxically announced. In the 1990s, we talked about how, once upon a time, the internet was a military project run by ARPA, but now that the National Science Foundation was in charge, it would be instead the culmination of Vannevar Bush’s imagination of the Memex, organizing the world’s knowledge for all to access and navigate, like a vast memory palace. ... But even this capitalism enthusiasm was tempered by the many things the internet still could have been. Even doused in lubricant, it was still an artistic medium, a hive mind, a multiplayer game, a playing field leveller, and a destroyer of old Idols, whether of the market, the university or the government. The internet we could have had was a haven for hackers and activists, legal scholars and (digital) anthropologists, net.artists and music pirates, cultural critics and journalists, meme-makers and Anonymous...."