Cyber-utopianism was always bunk. The web was never democratic and it has become more or less what techno-realists like myself always expected it to become: a new playground for capitalism. It didn’t happen without resistance and that resistance certainly hasn’t stopped. But from the first moments that networking moved beyond the military and academic research,…Continue readingCultures of the Web Wrap Up
According to the ITU (see below), 61.8% of Cubans used the internet in 2019, though other sources have lower numbers (49.1% in 2020, according to Wikipedia; 40.3% in 2020, according to InternetWorldStats). Whatever the exact figure, there is no question that current levels are a sharp increase in a short period of time – doubling…Continue readingA ‘Weekly Package’
To think about ‘Decolonizing the Web’ starts with thinking about the web as a colonial space. One has two immediate, diametrically opposed reactions as soon as one introduces that frame. On the one hand, how could the web be colonized? It’s not like anyone is Indigenous to the internet, much less the web. Given that…Continue readingColonialism and the Web