Foreword

On the shelf beside my desk rest a number of recent and already dogeared books about the digital age: Consent of the Networked by Rebecca MacKinnon, The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu, China’s Contested Internet by Guobin Yang, Twitter and Tear Gas by Zeynep Tufekci, The Net Delusion by Evgeny Morozov, Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neill, and Dragnet Nation by Julia Angwin. Stacked nearby are countless nongovernmental organization reports and academic studies about the ways in which the Internet is affecting the enjoyment of human rights, with titles like Tainted Leaks (Citizen Lab), Online and on All Fronts (Human Rights Watch), Let the Mob Do the Job (Association for Progressive Communications), Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers (Oxford Internet Institute), and ¿Quién defiende tus datos? (Derechos Digitales). What connects these disparate publications? Apart from all having a focus on the individual’s experience in the digital age, not a single one tells a hopeful story about personal autonomy, freedom of expression, security, or privacy online. Not one of these publications highlights the ways in which the Internet has opened broad avenues of communication among cultures, permitted the sharing of information and ideas across borders, and offered vast expanses of knowledge that can be traversed from link to link and thread to thread online. Some of them focus on the repression of governments that criminalize expression online or conduct surveillance of their citizens and others. Some drill down into the ways in which private companies govern quasipublic space, share information with governments seeking access to their networks, or simply give the false impression of privacy or security in the shadow of what Peter Swire has called “The Golden Age of Surveillance.”