Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace Read Free Page A

people in a single communications environment – in less than twenty years. And it is moving onward, accelerating in fact, bringing legions into its fold each and every day.
    The amount of digital information now doubles every year, and the “information superhighway” might be best described ascontinuous exponential growth, more on-ramps, more data, all the time, faster, more immediate, more accessible, its users always on, always connected. This speed and volume make getting a handle on the big picture difficult, and the truth is – a hideous truth, especially for those of you who think of yourselves as “off the grid,” somehow away from the connected world, and proudly disconnected – is that no one is immune. Let’s imagine for a moment that you don’t own a computer, have never sent an email or text, and don’t know what “app” means. The thing that informs you, that prepares you for cocktail parties and other gatherings, is mainstream or “old” media – newspapers, radio, and TV. Look closely at this “old media”: How much of it is now “informed by,” even directed by, “new media,” by thousands, even millions, of “citizen journalists,” unpaid, unaccountable, but with cellphone cameras permanently at the ready, documenting events as they happen in real time, unfiltered, and, perhaps, unreliable. The other truth is that no one really knows what this hurricane will leave behind or where it will take us. We’re just struggling to hang on.
    Another chief difference between then and now is that today, through cyberspace, it is us, the users, who create the information, do the connecting, and sustain and grow this unique communications and technological ecosystem. Save for the telephone, previous communications revolutions required a certain passivity on the part of consumers. There was little or no interactivity. We turned on the radio and listened, watched television happy to tune out and not to have to respond. The information provided, even the news of the day, simply washed over us. (We might get a call from a ratings agency, might be polled, might write a letter to the editor, but in the main we were passive recipients not active participants.) Cyberspace is wholly different, and potentially far more egalitarian. It is the lonely man in a café clicking away, the mother out for dinner with friends discreetly contacting her kids, the armedmilitant in Mogadishu, the criminal in Moscow, as much as it is anyone or any institution in particular, who feed the machine, cause it to grow, to envelop us further. While it is difficult to pin down a constantly moving target, this much can be said: it is peculiar to cyberspace that we, the users, shape it as much as we are shaped by it. We are at it every day, every night, transforming it all the while. Cyberspace is what we make of it. It is ours. We need to remember this before it slips through our grasp.
    This remains the issue. One of the extraordinary – and for many liberating – things about cyberspace is that while massive and hugely profitable corporations like Apple and Google have made it possible and accessible (virtually) to all, they don’t actually control it. Indeed, while having seeded the terrain, Apple, Google, and other gigantic corporations might have no greater control over cyberspace than those of us operating alone, at home, at our computer screens. This generative quality changes everything, causes grave concern, causes many to demand that cyberspace be brought under control.
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    It’s difficult not to marvel at the extraordinary benefits of cyberspace. To be able to publish anything and have it immediately reach a potential worldwide audience represents a democratization of communications that philosophers and science fiction writers have dreamed about for centuries. Families continents apart now share in each other’s daily struggles and triumphs. Physicians connect with patients thousands of kilometres