Re: nettime: push media

[dmandl@panix.com (David Mandl)]

Excellent piece, Geert!

Wired is either full of shit (the advent of push technology has completely
contradicted what they've been saying all along and they're trying to lie
about that), or cynical and evil (they knew this is what would happen all
along but were talking like revolutionaries at the beginning just to gain
market share and credibility with net libertarians).

I can hardly wait for Wired to publish breathless editorials on these
exciting phenomena when they happen:

- The death of small ISPs and eventual control of the net by a handful of
national (multinational?) providers, quite likely existing
mega-corporations like AT&T and Microsoft

- The final death or atrophying of Usenet, the net's oldest forum for open,
many-to-many discussion, finally making the net almost completely read-only
and devoid of "public space"

- The increasing willingness of net-related businesses to sell users out by
cooperating with the U.S. government in exchange for favors: using weak
encryption, turning mail logs over to the FBI, supporting anti-privacy
legislation, etc.

- Increasingly frequent crackdowns on porn, "illegal" information or
"libel," dissident literature, etc., on the net

- The growth of sophisticated dossier-building by employers and
governments, and the exchange of information between them

- The invasion of every inch of the net by advertisements

Will Wired support these developments?  Will they claim they predicted them
all along?  Will they try to put their patented
radical-techno-postcapitalist spin on them to make them seem somehow like
cool third-wave phenomena?

Stay tuned.

   --Dave.

--
Dave Mandl
dmandl@panix.com
davem@wfmu.org
http://www.wfmu.org/~davem


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