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Control and Freedom

The end of the Cold War was the triumph of the free: the Free World, Free Market and Free circulation of information. These triumphs have all been linked to technology. However in doing so we attribute  causality to technology and freedom to control technologies.

In this process Internet was conflated with cyberspace to be sold as a tool freedom. For by it's technological design it could not be censored. By allowing for seeming anonymous communications people would be freed from the limitations of their bodies. Especially those of race, class and sex. Next to that the internet promised to break media monopolies.

The rhetoric of the internet as freedom was also accompanied by rumors of the internet as a control structure. Citing capabilities by governments to listen in to communications and corporations of following our every move with cookies. 

The question whether it's a tool of control or a tool of freedom is a misguided one that stems form a paranoid response to power. This paranoia emerges from reducing political problems into technological ones. A reduction that blinds us from realising both how these technologies work and fail to work. And thus that the freedom and control the internet enables are not complete.

As an example: the client-server model of the WWW is as much a cultural construction as a technological one.

The internet as a surveillance device is the obverse, not the opposite of the internet as an agency-enhancing technology. The one requires the other.