Occupy the Internet!

The popular internet as a phenomenon has gone through a number of phases in its short history—decentralized and obscure, to commercial, then to highly participatory (and highly centralized). At each stage critical thinkers have written about the socio-political impact of digitizing everything. The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor is the latest book to tackle these issues. Taylor does an excellent job synopsizing internet criticism over the past half-decade. In fact, her second footnote recommends a number of authors including Douglas Rushkoff, Nicholas Carr, Jaron Lanier and Evgeny Morozov among other curmudgeons of the internet. Many of Taylor’s targets are the same: Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis and Kevin Kelly have served as the rhetorical punching bags for many of the above-listed authors. Taylor labels these internet utopians and evangelists with the ostensibly mocking term “new-media...