Cory gave a talk at Harvard last night that I had to miss, but I was at the little lunch the Berkman Center threw for him that afternoon. Cory held forth in that brilliant way of his about the war against the Internet. (Will someone find something that he doesn’t know…but please don’t tell him because then he’ll know that, too.)

One of the things I most like about Cory is that he looks at the likely effects of technology. I’ve had too many discussions with people I highly respect who act as if technology is neutral and that’s the end of the story. Of course tech is neutral in the sense that it can be used for good or evil. But the world in which technology exists is not neutral. So, we have to think about whether what we’re building is likely to make the world better or worse. Cory does that and has enough context to do so extraordinarily well.

I said something like this to him afterwards and he said that that’s what science fiction writers do: What would happen if this bit of tech or that were around?

Good point. Fiction overall makes choices and follows the consequences.

In the war to save our Internet, we need to enlist more fiction writers.

Cory uses the phrase “Dark Net” to denote the parts of the Net that escape from the strictures of the copyright totalitarians et al. I don’t like the term. It comes from a whitepaper by Peter Biddle, Paul England, Marus Peinado and Bryan Willman.* The darkness of the Dark Net implies that the activities there are shady. Some are, but many are just users using content they own.

So, I’d like to find a different term. Open Net? Free Net? Our Net? Resistance Net? User-owned Net? Keep Your Stinking Hands Off My Computer, You Corporate Fascists, Net? [Tags: cory_doctorow berkman dark_net digital_rights]

*It’s an odd paper because it argues that DRM and trusted computing will never eliminate all illegal sharing…odd because it comes from Microsoft guys working on eliminating what they consider illegal sharing. The paper did not foresee just how totalitarian the world was going to get.

Categories: Uncategorized dw