The Technical is Political

기술 발전은 자연법칙에 따라서만 이루어지는 것은 아닙니다. 기술은 사회 및 정치적인 제약 내에서 사회 구성원들의 일정한 목표를 추구하기 위해서 개발되고, 또 그러한 목적을 위해서 변형, 발전되기도 합니다. 그렇게 개발되고 변형된 기술은 다시 사회 및 정치 변화를 가져오기도 합니다. 기술 발전은 사회 및 정치와 무관하게 이루어지는 것이 아닙니다. 사회 및 정치 상황와 서로 영향을 주고 받으며 유기적으로 개발되고 발전됩니다.

미국 컴퓨터 과학은 1960년에 이미 인간의 뇌와 컴퓨터는 공생관계가 될 것이라고 예측합니다. 컴퓨터는 인간의 사고 방식을 모방하여 만들어 졌기 때문입니다. 인터넷은 핵전쟁에 대비하여 어느 말단에서 다른 말단에 중간자의 개입 없이 정보를 전달할 수 있도록 설계되었습니다. 컴퓨터와 인터넷이 합해지면서 모든 인간을 연결할 수 있는 거대한 신경망이 형성됩니다.

초기 인터넷은 교육도구, 지식 공유도구, 연구도구의 개념으로 발전합니다. 1990년대부터는 하이퍼 텍스트와 웹의 발전으로 상업화의 길을 트게 됩니다. 인터넷과 정보가 결합된 사회에서는 정보가 있는 곳에 관심(attention)이 쏠리게 되고 관심이 있는 곳에 돈이 모이게 됩니다. 자본이 인터넷의 잠재력에 관심을 가지고 투자를 시작하면서 상업화에 유리한 방향으로 기술이 발전합니다. 저작권 보호를 위한 기술 구조의 변경에 이어, 상업화와 관심 경제(Attention Economy)를 위한 실명화, 그리고 이를 바탕으로 한 센싱 기술과 데이터베이스가 결합합니다. 넷은 광고를 기반으로한 컨텐츠 소비도구로 변화하고 나아가 광고를 보다 효과적으로 전달하기 위한 정보수집 및 분석 수단으로, 안보와 법치를 위한 통제 수단으로 기술 구조가 변경됩니다.

• J.C.R. Licklider, Man-computer symbiosis. IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, volume HFE-1, pages 4-11, March 1960
  • in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.

• Vinton G. Cerf & Robert E. Kahn, A protocol for packet network intercommunications, IEEE Transactions on Communications COM-22, 637-648, May 1974
  • both economic and technical considerations lead us to prefer that the interface be as simple and reliable as possible and deal primarily with passing data between networks that use different packet switching strategies.

• Tim Berners-Lee, Information Management: A Proposal, March 1989, May 1990
  • It discusses the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems and derives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system.

• Gary Wolfe, The (Second Phase of the) Revolution Has Begun, Wired Magazine, 10.01. 1994.
  • Mosaic is not the most direct way to find online information. Nor is it the most powerful. It is merely the most pleasurable way, and in the 18 months since it was released, Mosaic has incited a rush of excitement and commercial energy unprecedented in the history of the Net.

• Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff, The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet, Wired, 08. 17. 2010.
  • The story of industrial revolutions, after all, is a story of battles over control. A technology is invented, it spreads, a thousand flowers bloom, and then someone finds a way to own it, locking out other

• Barry M. Leiner 외, Brief History of the Internet, Internet Society, 15 Oct 2012
  • The most pressing question for the future of the Internet is not how the technology will change, but how the process of change and evolution itself will be managed.

• Ben Tarnoff, How the internet was invented, The Guardian, Friday 15 July 2016
  • That’s why they designed the internet to run anywhere: because the US military is everywhere

• Gihring, Tim. "The rise and fall of the Gopher protocol". minnpost.com, Aug 11, 2016
  • I saw a URL on the side of a bus,” he says. “That’s when I knew the Web was all about advertising. Gopher was not good for advertising. I knew it would start winding down.”

• Brian Feldman, 8 (Completely Plausible) Alternate Histories of the Internet, New York Magazine, October 17, 2016
  • The internet was a series of technological developments, each stacked on the others.

• Christopher Markou, Neuralink wants to wire your brain to the internet what could possibly go wrong?, The Conversation, May 2, 2017.
  • I cannot imagine a scenario in which there would not be an endless number of governments, advertisers, insurers and marketing folks looking to tap into the very biological core of our cognition to use it as a means of thwarting evildoers and selling you stuff.

• Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, Penguin Books, 1967
  • Elecrtic circuitry, an extention of the central nervous system

• Michael H. Goldhaber, The Attention Economy: The Natural Economy of the Net, First Monday, April 1997
  • There is something else that moves through the Net, flowing in the opposite direction from information, namely attention. So seeking attention could be the very incentive we are looking for.
  • Money now flows along with attention.

• Philippe Aigrain, Attention, Media, Value and Economics, First Monday, September 1997
  • The growth of the attention economy will be possible only on the basis of perception and creation tools and infrastructure, that allow for the seamless integration between giving attention and creating artefacts which deserve it

• Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Cooking Pot Markets: An Economic Model for the Trade in Free Goods and Services on the Internet, First Monday, March 1998
  • The cooking-pot model provides a rational explanation for people's motivations to produce and trade in goods and services, where a monetary incentive is lacking. It suggests that people do not only - or even largely - produce in order to improve their reputation, but as a more-than-fair payment for other goods - “ideas” - that they receive from the cooking-pot.

• Saul Hansell, In Wired World, Much Is Free at Click of a Mouse, New York Times, October 14, 1999

• Aral Balkan, you are product, re:publica, 2015

• Eben Moglen, The Invisible Barbecue, Columbia Law Review, 1997
  • we have seen the American Republic go through major adjustments in basic political economy before as a consequence of exploiting new infrastructural technology

• Eben Moglen, Freedom In The Cloud, Internet Society of NY, February 5, 2010
  • the Net, once it became a hierarchically architected zone with servers in the center and increasingly dis-empowered clients at the edge, becomes the zone of platforms and platform making becomes the order of the day.

• Michael Liedtke, Google's 1Q lobbying bill hits new high of $1.48M, boston.com, April 22, 2011
  • as the Internet search leader's expansion plans and privacy breaches draw more government scrutiny.

• Laura DeNardis, Hidden Levers Of Internet Control, Information, Communication & Society, 15:5, 720-738, 2012
  • Infrastructure design and administration internalize the political and economic values that ultimately influence the extent of online freedom and innovation

• 이계수, "법학, 어떻게 입문할 것인가?“, 민주법학 제54호(2014.3.1), 485-516쪽.
  • 정치적인 것은 모든 인간사회에 본래부터 있으며 우리의 존재론적 조건을 결정하는 하나의 차원으로 생각해야 한다.

• Cohen, Julie E., The Zombie First Amendment (July 29, 2014). William & Mary Law Review, Vol. 56, No. 3, 2015
  • the label “speech” has become a fig leaf strategically deployed to denote and legitimize proprietary claims over the patterns of information flow.

• Yochai Benkler, Degrees of Freedom, Dimensions of Power, Daedalus, 145(1) 18-32 (2016).
  • if we are to preserve the democratic and creative promise of the Internet, we must continuously diagnose control points..(app store, mobilewireless cellular networks, the death of copper, cloud computing, big data andits uses in behavioral control, the increased identifcation of content as culture)

• Carole Cadwalladr, Google, democracy and the truth about internet search, Guardian, 4 December 2016
  • We are talking about the most powerful mind-control machine ever invented in the history of the human race. And people don’t even notice it.

• John Tagliabue, Europe Offering Free Calls, But First, a Word From . . ., New York Times, September 28, 1997
  • To make a call, subscribers dial a toll-free number and are welcomed by a five-second commercial. After punching in their identification number, callers hear a second commercial, after which they make their calls.

• Saul Hansell and Amy Harmon, Caveat Emptor on the Web: Ad and Editorial Lines Blur, New York Times, February 26, 1999
  • Anyone going on line should assume that there is an advertising influence on most of the content they see

• Stephanie Clifford, Newspapers’ Web Revenue Is Stalling, New York Times, October 12, 2008
  • Given the choice of showing an ad-free page and making no money, or using an ad network and making a few cents, many publishers choose networks.

• Mike Isaac Can Reddit Grow Up?, New York Times, July 27, 2014
  • People on Reddit want to be anonymous, and at some point these brands want to have a real relationship with their customers

• Josh Constine, BuzzFeed’s Future Depends On Convincing Us Ads Aren’t Ads, Tech Crunch, August 12, 2014
  • Once upon a time, mediums like television hosted both content (tv shows) and ads (commercials) that looked similar but were made by different companies. Now, BuzzFeed makes the channel, the content, and the ads

• Amanda Hess, How YouTube’s Shifting Algorithms Hurt Independent Media, The New York Times, APRIL 17, 2017
  • All of that means that new media creators hoping to make a living online need to play by YouTube’s rules, and steer clear of anything “potentially objectionable” not to real people, who might actually be offended, but to robots.

• Kate Knibbs, The Internet Is Built for Advertisers, The Ringer, 2017. 8. 6.
  • The problem isn’t that the internet functions as a marketplace. It’s that, increasingly, the marketplace function is not only superseding but interfering with and corrupting its other functions