Download The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It AudioBook Free
This extraordinary publication explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity--and discloses that it is sputtering precisely due to its runaway success. While using unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is over a path to a lockdown, ending its routine of innovation--and facilitating unsettling new sorts of control. IPods, iPhones, Xboxes, and TiVos stand for the first wave of Internet-centered products that can't be easily altered by anyone except their vendors or selected companions. These "tethered home appliances" have been completely used in remarkable but little-known ways: car Gps device systems have been reconfigured at the demand of law enforcement to eavesdrop on the occupants all the time, and digital video recorders have been purchased to self-destruct because of a lawsuit against the maker thousands of mls away. New Blogging platforms 2.0 websites like Yahoo mash-ups and Facebook are rightly touted--but their applications can be similarly monitored and removed from a central source. As tethered home appliances and applications eclipse the Laptop or computer, the very characteristics of the Internet--its "generativity," or progressive character--is in danger. 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 solutions like Wikipedia that have up to now survived their own successes, this publication shows how to develop new solutions and social structures that allow users to work artistically and collaboratively, participate in solutions, and be true "netizens."
