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Recently in Salon Technology

Technology: View from the top
GM's e-mobile magnate
Mark Hogan is in the "Web on wheels" driver's seat, trying to put GM on a collision course with Gen X.
By Janelle Brown
[11/08/99]

Do the paranoid survive?
Judge Jackson's opus on the browser wars portrays a Microsoft terrified by middleware.
By Mark Gimein
[11/06/99]

"It reads like a novel"
Judge Jackson's findings are music to prosecutors' ears -- but Microsoft says it's guilty of nothing more than embodying "the most basic American values."
By Janelle Brown
[11/06/99]

21st Challenge
21st Challenge No. 28
Forward, march! Join the dance of the eternally circulating e-mail.
By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau
[11/06/99]

Is Linux the real remedy?
The open-source camp welcomes the findings of fact. But some think that Linux doesn't need the courts to beat Redmond.
By Andrew Leonard
[11/06/99]

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The appearance of railroads, for instance, once prompted otherwise rational people to pronounce the imminent end of class stratification; as the rails annihilated the distances between rich and poor, a universal brotherhood of mankind would surely result. The arrival of the telephone similarly prompted others to declare the end of the city -- nearly a century before present-day suburbanites more soberly decided that telecommuting was a mixed blessing at best.

The Control Revolution: How the Internet is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know By Andrew Shapiro McGraw/Hill 286 pages Buy The Control Revolution

The Internet has hardly been an exception; the age of the Web has set high watermarks for just this kind of Panglossian fever. In his book, "The Control Revolution: How the Internet is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know," Andrew Shapiro continues this durable tradition, telling us the Internet brings with it a new era of universal empowerment. The formerly voiceless, choiceless masses, once trapped on the wrong side of the one-to-many broadcast equation (radio, TV) or confined within one-to-one networks (telephony), can now look forward to the exponentially greater personal control that the ubiquity of many-to-many Internet connections will certainly bring.

This new paradigm of infinite, instantaneous feedback will break the tyranny of those intermediaries, gatekeepers and arbiters who at present assert a hammer-lock on our culture. In fact, their grip already seems to be slipping. Are you tired of liberal journalists and industry-puppet news dailies? Just put on an eccentric hat and start your own news wire, say, www.drudgereport.com. Despairing of your stockbroker's lame tips and high commissions? Send him a pink slip and start trading online. Totalitarian government got you under the gun? FTP some HTML to your Web site and foment a revolution. The Internet is the great leveler, we are told, where everybody's voice is broadcast at equal volume, and all information sinks or swims purely on its own merit. Or so the theory goes.

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