(with no apologies to George Orwell)
“The promise of the information superhighway is that we all become librarians and reporters. The danger right now is most people don’t understand the responsibilities that come with their new roles.”--Carl M. Kadie
The Internet was more prosperous now, and better organized: it had even been enlarged by satellite stations which circled the globe. The Information Infrastructure had been successfully completed at last, and the Net possessed a federal bureaucracy and a budget of its own, and various new backbones had been added to it. Gore had bought himself a Macintosh. The Internet, however, had not after all been used for generating knowledge. It was used for manufacturing consent, and brought in a handsome vote tally. The netizens were hard at work building yet another network; when that one was finished, so it was said, cryptography would be allowed. But the luxuries of which the Electronic Frontier Foundation had once taught the netizens to dream, the libraries of free information and hot and cold political discussion, and the three-day telecommute, were no longer talked about. The President had denounced such ideas as contrary to the spirit of Communitarianism. The truest happiness, he said, lay in consuming locally and conforming globally.
Everyone knows that.
Science promised man power. But, as so often happens when people are seduced by promises of power, the price exacted in advance and all along the path, and the price actually paid, is servitude and impotence. Power is nothing if it is not the power to choose. Instrumental reason can make decisions, but there is all the difference between deciding and choosing.”--Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason
