 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity—and reveals that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation—and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control. IPods, iPhones, Xboxes, and TiVos represent the first wave of Internet-centered products that can’t be easily modified by anyone except their vendors or selected partners. These “tethered appliances” have already been used in remarkable but little-known ways: car GPS systems have been reconfigured at the demand of law enforcement to eavesdrop on the occupants at all times, and digital video recorders have been ordered to self-destruct thanks to a lawsuit against the manufacturer thousands of miles away. New Web 2.0 platforms like Google mash-ups and Facebook are rightly touted—but their applications can be similarly monitored and eliminated from a central source. As tethered appliances and applications eclipse the PC, the very nature of the Internet—its “generativity,” or innovative character—is at risk. The Internet’s current trajectory is one of lost opportunity. Its salvation, Zittrain argues, lies in the hands of its millions of users. Drawing on generative technologies like Wikipedia that have so far survived their own successes, this book shows how to develop new technologies and social structures that allow users to work creatively and collaboratively, participate in solutions, and become true “netizens.” |
Average Customer Rating:    Aristotechnology Anyone interested in the future of freedom should read Jonathan Zittrain's book, The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It. Just the picture on the hardcover edition is worth the price of the book. But it goes much deeper on the first page and keeps going. This is a challenging read, and the ideas covered are vital to our future.
The internet is at a crossroads, Zittrain argues, and will go either in the direction of grassroots generativity or tethered cybersecurity. The first will increase freedom, while the second will maintain security at the cost of many aristocratic controls. Neither path is perfect, and both have some merit. Few people know how crucial this choice is or that it is being made now. Yet the future of freedom hangs on it.
This is not hyperbole. It is real, and it is timely.
The internet has been a great source of innovation, creativity and freedom, because it has been generative. This means that anybody with a computer and internet hookup could put whatever they wanted online. On the one hand this is a powerful freedom, but on the other hand there have been many abuses. Online, person A's opinion has the same weight as person B's. But what if person A is a seventeen-year-old Nazi sympathizer? The proponents of generativity argue that over time most people will listen to reason and we can trust that the outcome will work out well. Others wonder--what about the six or eighteen who do listen to the Nazi promoter? School shootings and terrorist bombings promote the idea that some type of regulation may be warranted.
If anybody can say anything online, what of accuracy, decency, or safety? Internet promoters make a lot of money passing around false messages, without editors like the print and broadcast media. Is it the destiny of the internet to be the major provider of yellow journalism, child pornography, and shadiness? Strong words, but the reality is even stronger. Is the generative future viable without a balance of freedom and order?
The other future is the tethered appliance, as Zittrain calls it. Instead of a two-way communication, this type of technology allows the user to call, email or otherwise use the iPhone, TiVo, Onstar, the internet, software or other technology. Sometimes a central operator controls the flow and edits it to ensure safety and perhaps even accuracy or decency. For example, if a user downloads copyrighted material illegally, and then sends it to a friend, the technology provider is liable and will likely not allow the transfer. In tethered appliances, the technology company can monitor the usage. For example, TiVo was able to report that Janet Jackson's Super Bowl performance was rewound three times more often than any other part of the Super Bowl.
If the company can monitor users, the government can too. What does this mean for the future of privacy?
Zittrain is a supporter of generativity, and very concerned about the loss of freedom that a tethered society would bring. But the challenge to freedom goes much deeper. In fact, even the generative technologies are easily tethered. With spy ware your personal computer work can be monitored---by private or government watchers. Your conversations while driving can be listened to if you have Onstar, and of course, phone calls can be overheard.
As digital technology increases, perhaps anything and everything can be watched--by companies, individuals and governments.
Papers, documents, conversations--nothing is private in a digital world. The solution has little to do with generativity vs. tethering, and more to do with separations, checks and balances. Technology gives governments more power, and so the need for Constitutional overrides is even stronger. I've heard it said that the U. S. Constitution was made for an agrarian people, and is therefore inadequate for our day. In fact, our modern technologies make the Constitutional checks and balances more important now than ever. If anything, we need even stronger ones!
Amazingly, the 1789 U. S. Constitution solves the current generativity vs. tethering question. It allows both, and keeps both within proper boundaries. Some regulation is needed, or we'll be stuck with privacy for aristocrats (who can afford it) and aristocratic surveillance of everyone else in practically all aspects of life. Under a full constitutional model, privacy would be regulated and maintained by the right people in the right way--with oversight by the people, and effective checks and balances. Under our current model, this is disappearing.
Since 1945 there has been a gradual, some would say rapid, de-emphasis of the clear separations, checks and balances of the Constitution. In practice, this is a tragedy. Today, more than ever, we need a citizenry who demands that the Constitution be followed--as it is on paper, not as "experts" have interpreted it. And that's not a criticism of the judiciary or executive alone. If anything, it is Congress and the state legislatures who are most to blame. Fortunately, they are the closest to the people, and therefore the most likely to change. But change will only come when people, regular people, read and study and support the U. S. Constitution.
In general, technology is a great benefit to prosperity, security, lifestyle and progress. Adopting effective principles of freedom actually allows technology to progress faster, without tethering its users to an aristocratic Big Brother.
When technology flourishes, power increases. But power can be used for or against freedom. Progress is measured by the increase or decrease of freedom and technology. When both are prevalent, society progresses and prospers. When both are diminished, society regresses. But the real value of this measurement tool is the gap between the two.
When technology is high and freedom low, power centers in the aristocratic or autocratic few, and society, happiness and prosperity decline. While some few find success, society as a whole degenerates.
When freedom is high and technology low, freedom itself naturally foments technological progress. Sometimes a nation in this situation is conquered by a stronger power before it completes its technological growth, but high freedom tends to catalyze technological growth.
In contrast, low freedom always blocks or at the very least slows technology.
Conclusion
History provides this clear lesson for our day: tethered technology is a means of rule, not leadership, and eventually decreases or drastically slows technological progress.
Some would argue that the model is flawed, that it leaves out morality (be it fidelity in marriage or responsible protection of the environment). But morality is technology in the best sense--strong family and environmental values and practices meet all the criteria of the best other technologies and increase progress, power, prosperity and freedom when applied by a society.
Freedom is neither anti-technology nor pro-technology patently. Freedom principles are against tethered, controlling, manipulative and aristocratic technologies or uses, and strongly support technological progress and freedom together.
OK This book was way too long. Much of the book seems repetitive. That being said, there were some very interesting and valuable concepts explained in the book. I hoped the content would be as intriguing as the title Despite the title "the Future of the Internet", more than half the book is about its past including the history of PCs. In simple words, the book was boring. Maybe it would have been more interesting, if it used more subtitles or in-text information boxes to make it more attractive. Generation Generators The Internet has indeed evolved and it continues to create myriad social and legal questions far beyond battles over hacking and file sharing. In fact, technological control and government regulation are now the biggest issues, but they've largely escaped the public's notice. This book is a very useful primer on up-to-the-minute issues in cyberlaw, and Zittrain insightfully frames the history of the Internet from multiple social and technical perspectives. The Internet was once totally user-defined but is now in the process of being locked down into proprietary tethered devices under the control of for-profit corporations, with the (supposed) need for security against hackers, viruses, and copyright infringement. But in the process, the Internet is in danger of becoming little more than a mass media outlet, to the peril of public collaboration and cooperative programming.
These are truly worrisome issues, and Zittrain frames the problem very well, but as the book drags along his overall argument becomes more and more directionless. The first problem is that Zittrain expends far too much effort trying to add theoretical support to his concept of "generativity," reaching awkwardly into areas of education policy and social construction of technology that are not his forte. And while Zittrain maps out the potentially unhappy "Future of the Internet," he comes up short on "How to Stop It" - or even why. Surely a certain segment of netizens would wish to avert the coming disaster, but it's a disaster that probably only they can see. Zittrain bemoans, but largely evades, the fact that the overwhelming majority of current Internet users are passive consumers of information on sites like this one.
This book's main deficiency is not in framing the problem, but in making the need for solutions relevant to the huge demographic that really has some kind of say in the near future of the Internet. Besides, technology will still allow truly passionate netizens to abandon the locked-down and corporatized World Wide Web. Figuring out how to make everyone else care is still the 64 gazillion dollar question. [~doomsdayer520~] interesting, but flawed, look at the future of cyberspace Contrary to what Zittrain would have us believe, reports of the Internet's death have been greatly exaggerated. Not only is the Net not dying, but there are signs that digital generativity and online openness are thriving as never before.
Essentially, Zittrain creates a false choice regarding the digital future we face. He doesn't seem to believe that a hybrid future is possible or desirable. In reality, however, we can have a world full of some tethered appliances or even semi-closed networks that also includes generative gadgets and open networks. After all, millions of us love our iPhones and TiVos, but we also take full advantage of the countless other open networks and devices at our disposal.
Further, while it's true that the creators of iPhone and TiVo maintain a high degree of control over the guts of the devices or their operating systems, the technologies themselves are hardly sterile or non-generative. In fact, these devices have amazing uses, and they have both recently become more open to third-party add-ons and applications. Geeks who demand still more are also hacking away at these and other digital devices to get them to do everything but wash their dishes.Most of us want networks and digital devices that work.
Zittrain, by contrast, seems to long for the era when we all had to load floppy disks into our PCs each morning to get our operating systems running. But those were hardly the good old days. Device makers realized that only techno-geeks would tolerate such hassles, and so our PCs and phones now come with more software and services built in to make our lives easier. Nothing stands in the way of those who still prefer the rugged individualist approach to conquering cyber-frontiers and digital devices. But what Zittrain does in The Future of the Internet is generalize his personal preferences to the whole of cyber-society. What's good for the ivory-tower digerati may not be what the rest of us want or need. [My complete review of Jonathan's book can be found on the Technology Liberation Front blog.] |  |
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