Internet & telecom articles
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The internet is in decline – it needs rewilding
The online world was meant to be an open system but has become dominated by huge corporations. If we are to revive it, that must endBrowsing through a history of online public messaging last week, I came across a magical photograph from 1989 or 1990. It shows the world’s first web server. It was Tim Berners-Lee’s NeXT workstation in Cern, the international physics research lab, where he worked at the time. On the case is a tattered sticky label, on which is scribbled, in red ink, “This machine...
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The internet has turned us into zombies
The internet spreads out like a virus. As it becomes ubiquitous, so are its influences. The same slang is shared in all fifty states through the influence of social media, the same arguments are repeated online by people in disparate corners of faraway states, and gradually, the same manner of dress is adopted almost universally. The internet is a force of widespread cultural homogenization much in the same way that the spread of the English language via the British Empire was, only the internet...
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The Enlightenment had its own internet: The Republic of Letters
There was no internet during the Enlightenment, but something surprisingly similar did exist in the 17th and 18th centuries. This was the Republic of Letters: a virtual, global community of scientists and intellectuals who exchanged information using the fastest technology available at the time — the postal service. 15,000 letters The clue is in the name: letters tied this self-proclaimed, transnational society together. Lots of letters. What this “metaphysical republic” lacked in speed, it made...