Essay by Lewis Hyde, with a response by Daithi Mac Sithigh In 1739 the Methodist minister George Whitefield arrived in Philadelphia to preach evangelical Protestantism. At first the local clergy shared their pulpits with the visitor, but soon they turned against him and forced him to deliver his message in the streets and fields. Benjamin […]
essay by Kenneth Neil Cukier, a response to “ICANN’s Constitutional Moment” by Susan Crawford The debate over Internet governance and the foundation of ICANN represented the Internet’s first “civil war” — but all sides lost. The only thing bonding the fractious “Internet community” together in the talks that led to ICANN a decade ago this […]
essay by Susan Crawford, with a response by Kenn Cukier The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, coordinates name and number identifiers for the Internet. In a nutshell, ICANN coordinates actors who make sure that there is only one .com in the list of top level domains (like .com, .net, .org, and […]
essay by Dan Gillmor with responses by Daisy Pignetti and Evgeny Morozov. The democratization of media is no longer in doubt. Digital media tools, increasingly cheap and ubiquitous, have spawned a massive amount of media creation at all levels, most notably from the edges of networks. These networks have provided vast access to what people […]
essay by Ellen Miller I have always had a particular affinity for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who entered Harvard Law School at the tender age of 18, and then graduated in 1877 at the top of his class and with the highest marks of any student in the law school’s history . His nearly […]
essay by Doc Searls We’re always talking about something else. Regardless of the subject at hand, we have other subjects in mind that help us say what we mean. According to cognitive science, all of our thought and speech is metaphorical. That is, we understand everything in terms of something else. For example, time is […]
essay by Clay Shirky On a Monday morning in March of 2006, forty thousand students in southern California stunned teachers and administrators by walking out of school to protest HR4437, a bill in the US Congress that would have mandated a crackdown on US immigrant populations. The largely Latino student group had been inspired to […]
essay by Jonathan Zittrain, response by Reed Hundt Jonathan Zittrain: The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It On the 9th of January, 2007, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to an eager audience crammed into San Francisco’s Moscone Center. A beautiful and brilliantly engineered device, the iPhone blended three products into one: […]
essay by Reed Hundt, a response to Jonathan Zittrain The personal computer has been “generative” — Jonathan Zittrain’s felicitous coinage – because of what Andy Grove, Intel’s famed CEO during the Internet’s salad days, called the horizontal structure of the industry. He referred to the nature of the value chain: competitors in microprocessors did not […]
essay by Wendy Seltzer, a response to David Weinberger. “Rules are norms that have failed,” David Weinberger says in “Tacit Governance.” While his description rings true, the need for formalized governance is a sign of success, not failure. Our challenge is to move from norms to rules, building rules for the Internet that offer the […]
