Mark Pegrum: A belief in the power of the internet to transform the nature of communication, thought and society at large has led cultural critics such as David Porush[1] and Andrew Shapiro[2] to compare its invention to that of the alphabet, while a report published last year by RAND predicts that "the information revolution will change not just the way people behave ... but ... the way people understand and organize themselves - socially, culturally, politically, economically, governmentally, militarily, and even spiritually."[3] Clearly the internet is a, if not the, major technical component of such an information revolution. How great a change does the internet in fact herald? Is it really a glorified means of communication and information storage, or is it as significant as some observers are suggesting?

John Frow: The truth is that nobody has a clue what the internet portends. We know it's significant, but we don't know what the magnitude of that significance is, how it might work out. The best we can do is extrapolate from existing trends and guess about their impact. One thing to say straight up is that this impact is differential: use of the internet is restricted to those countries with functional telecommunications systems and widespread literacy; the average user is an eighteen-year-old American male. The other thing that has to be said is that the net and its social uptake are changing so fast that any answer I give now will look very different from an answer I might have given two years ago, and doubtless from the way I would answer in two years' time. The print revolution has been transforming the world over more than five centuries; the internet isn't much more than a decade old.

Let me take it systematically. The transformation of the economic field, to start there, by the generalised adoption of the internet can be divided into effects on relations between firms, and effects on relations between firms and customers. It's perhaps, at the moment, the area of business-to-business activity that has provided the major payoffs, with a quantum increase in trade opened up by the development of electronic marketplaces on standardised platforms. The finance sector has been the major beneficiary, but right across the spectrum the development of electronic inventories and databases has transformed trade between firms (as well as within firms operating across multiple sites). The downside has been a set of problems about security, including increased risk of espionage and the need for secure coding systems. Electronic retail commerce, by contrast, has failed to live up to initial expectations in many sectors, and it may be that it will take some time for trustworthy systems offering a genuine alternative to place-based shopping to develop.

In the political and bureaucratic domain, the potential of the internet, apart from its military applications, is still largely unrealised. This potential includes, at the most mechanical level, systems of online voting and new forms of public administration, such as - for example - the centralisation of patient files in electronically organised health systems, online diagnosis, online tax returns, consolidated registers of police files, and at the furthest reach "total" databases of population biographies. The opportunities for surveillance and control are one aspect of a potential redefinition of relations between citizens and the state; another, however, is a set of broader opportunities for extension of the franchise through new forms of direct citizenship exercised via continuous mandate - although whether a weakening of delegated autonomy and the duty of informed decision-making is in fact desirable is an open question. For oppositional politics, the capacities of the internet to mobilise political actors in and across virtual space have become increasingly important, although the key players to date have largely been right-wing anti-statist and populist groups.

In the cultural domain (in the narrow sense of aesthetic and intellectual production and consumption) certain areas, like music, have been transformed dramatically; so, I think, has scholarly and semi-scholarly activity, through massively increased access to databases of all kinds, through list discussion, and through electronic publishing, which is now the norm in many areas of science.[4] Distance education has been positioned to take advantage of the net, and we are now seeing major universities in alliance with corporate publishers seeking to hawk their wares electronically. Bandwidth constraints have inhibited the widespread dissemination of video, but this won't be the case for much longer. Perhaps the major expansions in the cultural domain, however, have been in the dissemination of pornography, the one clear commercial success in the cultural field, and of online gambling.

It is with "culture" in the broader sense, however, that the most subtle and far-reaching effects of the net are taking place. Together with mobile telephony, the internet has brought about a virtualisation of social relations - through email, chat, virtual work and the virtual reality of gameplay - that has changed our conception of what it means to be a person interacting with other persons in a way that has a precedent only in the comparable transformation effected by print. The virtualisation of subjectivity has suddenly and dramatically changed everything, and this process is only beginning.

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog, right? This much-quoted saying, which derives originally from a New Yorker cartoon caption,[5] is in many ways an attempt to capture one aspect of what you call the "virtualisation of subjectivity". On the net, we can become anything we want to be. Neal Stephenson's 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash puts it like this:

Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of your equipment. If you're ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If you've just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis ....[6]

Yet this is a hotly contested vision of cyberspace, perhaps increasingly so. Potential is one thing; reality - or virtuality - is another. There is the ever-present danger, noted by Underwood, that in internet culture, "only the white heterosexual male truly belong[s] since only he [can] pass as a neutral subject unmarked by difference, as a mind unencumbered by the body."[10] Certainly Dawn Dietrich,[11] Susan Herring,[12] Cheris Kramarae[13] and numerous others have noted large differences in the behaviour and "gendered [speech] styles"[14] of women online, and in the way they are treated. Furthermore, on the subject of "identity tourism" - largely gender and racial swapping experiments - in cyberspace, Lisa Nakamura warns of the danger of reinforcing rather than deconstructing stereotypes and hierarchies, and suggests that: "far from sensitizing users to the often painful experience of Otherness, Otherness itself becomes commodified."[15] In the end, it must be said, many commentators on the internet maintain an ambiguous position with regard to its liberatory potential for minorities: that is to say, they are hopeful, but doubtful. To what extent do you feel that the net has the potential to be a "great equaliser" - and to what extent is it likely to merely reinforce currently existing binarisms and hierarchies, or even exacerbate inequalities?

First, although this is a good and complex question which already contains most of what I want to say in response, let me just sound a note of caution about the concept of identity and the way it's so often formulated in cultural studies in relation to "minorities". For all our insistence on the heterogeneity of "identity", the word carries with it irreducible overtones of singularity as well as being continuous with older sociological conceptions of role and ego-psychological conceptions of true or essential selfhood. "Minority", by the same token, carries with it a set of values carried over from the domain of politics which split, as in your final paragraph, between notions of redress and notions of the affirmation of difference: neither of which seem to me particularly useful in this context, because each ends up construing identity as self-identical. More generally, the concept of "liberation" just seems to me to mistake the kinds of effects that can be expected of the occupation of positions on the net.

The virtualisation of selfhood involves its detachment from the embodied and grounded identity of face-to-face relations and its projection into other worlds with diminished responsibility for actions. There's nothing new or unusual about this: reading, and perhaps especially the reading of fiction, has always involved the occupation of fictive subject positions and identification with other selves; similarly for the watching of movies or television. What's different about selfhood on the internet is only the relatively unstructured nature of such projections - although this isn't true for gameplay, and we shouldn't minimise the conventionality of much position-taking in chatrooms or online discussion. Equally, "grounded" identity is always deeply bound up with complex structures of desiring fantasy, with the imagining of an illusory and originary wholeness. So the difference between virtual and embodied selfhood has to do with the degree of detachment from the consequences of actions (especially speech acts), and hence with the degree of fluidity of position-takings.

"Trying out" or "exploration" is one name for this; "trainings" is perhaps another, in the sense of preparation for a realm beyond that of suspended responsibility. What matters, of course, is the translation back from the experience of virtual selfhood to the experience of grounded selfhood. As your question suggests, we can only be ambivalent about this. A friend of mine suffers from cerebral palsy; on the net, this utopia of disembodiment, he is the bright, intelligent kid that he isn't perceived to be in the schoolroom, and his net experience gives him a confidence he would otherwise lack. But the net also allows me to occupy sadistic or racist positions without constraint. In gameplay, the archetypal position (the fantasy re-embodiment) is behind a gun. Although we just don't have either hard information or good theory about how imaginary position-taking translates back into the realm of consequences, the edge between virtual selfhood as exploration and virtual selfhood as training is a fine one. Yeats wrote: "We had fed the heart on fantasies; / The heart's grown brutal from the fare". It's not that we're ever free from the phantasms of selfhood, but that the habit of irresponsibility untaps both the positive potential and the potential dangers of living in the imagination.

Neither moralism nor triumphalism is the right response to this. If it's true that we're seeing the beginnings of a new technico-ethical formation in which selfhood is secured in different spaces, or rather in a new kind of plurality of grounded and ungrounded spaces, we should above all be cautious of valorising it as either a sensitising or a brutalising instrument. But I do want to question the almost universal assumption in the literature that fluidity or fragmentation or discontinuity of identity is in itself a good. Wide-ranging imaginative sympathy is one thing; the loss or confusion of ego-boundaries is indicative of psychosis. Identity-shopping and identity-colonialism (the widespread assumption by men of female names and speech positions, for example) float somewhere between these poles.

Having said that, let me say too how tepid, conventional and limited most of the position-taking I've encountered on the net actually is. More importantly, however, we shouldn't forget that most uses of the net are functional rather than exploratory; people use it to check their bank accounts, or to book a hotel room or a train, or to take part in a tutorial, or to construct a genealogy.... In all of these cases the translation between their grounded self and the subject positions they occupy in cyberspace is almost immediate and almost unnoticeable. It just doesn't matter whether or not they're a dog.

On the other hand, whether or not you're a dog might matter greatly in a world where internet access is mainly available to cats, and a very limited number of dogs make it online in the first place ... The simplistic essentialist implications of this analogy aside, this of course brings us to the question of the so-called "digital divide", a gap which exists not only between different societies but between different groups within any given society. You yourself mentioned earlier in this interview that the internet's impact is differential, given that it is not equally accessible to everyone, everywhere. Clearly, that's a point of considerable concern, both for cultural critics and for organisations ranging from RAND to the Fundación Acceso; Juliana Martinez, representing the latter, pointed out in 2000 that "the digital divide is the product of other gaps which if they are not attacked will continue to feed and even widen the digital divide, and vice versa."[16] Or, to put it more succinctly, as did Harold Thimbleby two years earlier: "Why use a modem when you have no clean water?"[17] More to the point, perhaps, how are you going to access a modem if you can't even access drinking water?

However, there may be another side to the issue, even if it is not as commonly expressed nowadays as it was just a few short years ago. In 1998, Martin Hall wrote of Africa: "the new digital technologies do indeed allow new forms of privilege, and also - simultaneously - new forms of individual power and mass participation."[18] As telecommunications costs fall, and rates of connectivity rise, so the argument goes, more and more people around the world will be able get online. Once, claimed Hall, time and space functioned as barriers to maintain privilege, but: "Digital technology is the Trojan Horse of such privileged spaces and their cultural markers".[19] Similarly, when Umberto Eco was interviewed the previous year about his Multimedia Arcade project, designed to make the net available to a wider section of the community in Bologna, he made it clear that he, too, recognised the net's mass potential, although he sounded a little less confident than Hall, stating: "What we need is a Luther of the Net."[20] What we need, in other words, is someone to ensure that the benefits of the net do in fact spread to the general population. From the point of view of digital technology and internet access, is it likely that for the foreseeable future we will continue living in two-speed - or multi-speed - societies in a two-speed - or multi-speed - world? And if so, do we need, and are we going to get, a Luther of the Net?

Rather than a Luther, it's perhaps a Fidel Castro of the Net that we need - using that name as shorthand for a programme of mass education in electronic literacy. But literacy education is not separable from infrastructure provision: teaching illiterate people how to read and write isn't just a matter of supplying an intellectual resource, it involves classrooms, trained teachers, an educational bureaucracy, methodologies of instruction (and the history of debates that underlie them), disciplines of the body, paper and pens, textbooks, libraries, librarians.... Most people in the world don't have a telephone, let alone online access. The digital divide directly reflects and directly reinforces inequalities of wealth and power. Sub-Saharan Africa, with 9.7% of the world's population, has 0.1% of its internet subscribers; numbers are rising slightly in absolute terms but relative to the developed world they're declining. In countries with more extensive (but still woefully inadequate) telecommunications systems, such as India or Malaysia or Brazil, access to the internet is largely confined to the professional classes, and is available much more extensively to men than to women. But those divisions by class and gender are mostly, if less severely, true of the developed nations as well. Even where access is both affordable and customary, use of the internet directly correlates with cultural capital, which correlates with educational level and thus, roughly, with social class. Cultural capital governs the two dimensions of print or electronic literacy, competence and confidence (or let's say technical and cultural competence); the latter in turn has to do with the cultural ordering of cyberspace, which is strongly gendered and strongly age-specific.

Electronic literacy can and should be taught: even skilled users like us (I mean middle-class academics) probably use, and know how to use, only a fraction of the resources available on the net. But the more fundamental question of unequally distributed infrastructural resources won't be solved by the many programmes set in place by UNESCO and the World Bank and the various European Union initiatives and the NGOs (non-governmental organisations), because it can't be separated from the question of a world order which proclaims evolutionary capital accumulation for all but practises and increases division and exploitation. Electronic communication reflects that order, and it's in no way capable of redressing it. There is no "general population", there's a tiny minority with wealth, power and technological resources, and a vast majority without them. And Trojan horses aren't even in the race just now.

Cyberimperialism? is the questioning title of a collection of essays edited by Bosah Ebo and first published in 2000.[21] In recent years, the concept of cultural imperialism, developed in the 1970s and primarily directed against US cultural dominance, has gradually morphed into the idea of globalisation. You yourself have commented, in your 1999 Accounting for Tastes, co-written with Tony Bennett and Michael Emmison, that cultural imperialism is a notion "whose ideological appeal always outweighed its analytical utility,"[22] and you marshal support for the view that the theory tends to simplistically undervalue the critical receptive skills of the audience(s), as well as overlooking the cross-influencing, hybrid nature of cultures proposed by the globalisation paradigm.[23] Is the concept of cultural imperialism, nonetheless, useful when discussing the internet revolution? To what extent is it meaningful to say that the internet functions as a cultural imperialist - or cyberimperialist - tool?

I was pessimistic about Trojan horses in my last answer, when it was a question of access and resources, but I'm a lot more optimistic when the metaphor is used to talk about the social life of messages on the net - when it's used, that is, not as an allegory of secret infiltration but as a way of describing the everyday interactions of Greeks and Trojans.

"Cultural imperialism" isn't a very happy term for describing the workings of the net because it implies a monolithic system in which messages are received without transformation or appropriation; the point about the net, however, is that it's an information storage and retrieval system which is dynamic and interactive. Certainly it's true that the default settings on the net are American: Americans are the dominant user group, they control the protocols, standards, and nomenclatures, they dominate net-commerce and scholarly resources, search engines are biased to American sites, and this quantitative dominance meshes with the force of the other US culture industries. It's only necessary to remember the way American addresses, unlike those of any other country, are unmarked, to understand what gets taken for granted here. Nevertheless, it doesn't seem to me very useful to work with a simple opposition of the global to the local, where the former means the United States and the latter means something like resistant national cultures; nor does it seem useful to think up ways in which the hegemony of the former can be modified or transformed by the latter.

What matters about Trojan horses is not their ability to find their way secretly into enemy territory and "make an impression"; rather, it's that there are so many of them, that there's nothing but horses, and that they're running in a lot of different races. Of course the net is part of the process of globalisation, but this isn't something that one can be "for" or "against" in any simple way; if globalisation is a process of concentration and domination, it's also a process of diversification and complexification. The potential of the net is to contribute to the formation of a genuinely dispersed global culture which has the capacity to work in extremely "local" ways (ordering takeaway food from a shop down the street, doing homework with your friends) but also in genuinely international ways: what matters is the interweaving of these things, the fact that this is a culture without a centre. Assertions of national cultural identity are one possible outcome of this process (machine translation has played a role in the formation of the increasingly self-confident net cultures of Japan or France, for example), but the more important thing that's going on here is that "localness" can be asserted and felt at any level of scale, and that these levels are fully interwoven. The net isn't imperialist because it isn't one thing; it's a network of networks, the very essence of which is to be both dispersed and partially convergent. And if so much of the net speaks with an American accent, this is above all because "American" (or what Joe Lockard somewhat more critically calls "cyber-english")[24] is the lingua franca of our time, one which, like vernacular Latin, is giving rise to quite new languages.

You mention the increasing self-confidence of France and Japan, but the former is of course a European power, while the latter is to date virtually alone among non-Western nations in having become fully industrialised. Rather than a specifically US imposition, is there perhaps a sense in which the net is, more broadly, a Western imposition on the world? Does the nature of the net, its form and focus, what it allows and doesn't allow, what it facilitates and obstructs, reflect an inherently Western bias?

This is the essence of a disturbing critique currently being made both from within and outside Western academia. The same Joe Lockard who writes about "cyber-english" also emphasises, elsewhere, what a number of African and African-American writers and critics have already pointed out, namely that not all cultural interactions translate well into a web format, and that not all narratives suit ASCII-based text screens or .gif files: on the web, he suggests, "[t]here is an unjustified presumptive universality of storytelling form and technique."[25] We might well ask ourselves: what is the place of oral storytelling traditions, social bases for the transmission of knowledge, or the grounding of stories in the specificities of local, non-generalisable cultures? Meanwhile, Islamic scholar Ziauddin Sardar, who sees the colonisation of cyberspace as an extension of European colonialism, writes: "Cyberspace is particularly geared towards the erasure of all non-Western histories ... Cyberspace is a giant step forward towards museumization of the world: where anything remotely different from Western culture will exist only in digital form."[26] Is the internet in fact inextricably bound up with the dominance of the West? How would you respond to claims of this extension of colonialism into cyberspace?

The net is "Western" in the sense that it was developed and is controlled by Western institutions, but the crucial thing about it is that it has no particular content and even no particular forms (indeed, its underlying cognitive organisation is arguably more "iconic" than "textual", and both email and online chat combine "written" with "oral" characteristics). There's something deeply essentialist about the argument that virtual communication is culturally "Western" (part of our supposedly more "abstract" civilisation). Older forms of grounding of stories and knowledges are disappearing equally for Western and non-Western communities, and they are being replaced - slowly and tentatively - by others: not by a single monolithic grounding, however, but by different forms adapted to different communities of users, some of which are transnational, others of which are quite local and specific.

My favourite parable about non-Western uses of information technology is Eric Michaels' essay on the Aboriginal invention of television at Yuendumu.[27] The Aboriginal world, says Michaels, is an information society; Warlpiri people "invented" television - produced programming and modes of shooting that could deal with, for example, the taboo on showing the faces of dead people, or with the spiritual force of country, and adapted and maintained minimal and "appropriate" video technology - as a way of strengthening the circulation of traditional knowledges, traditional narrative modes, and traditional relations of enunciative authority (but the concept of tradition here as everywhere also involves transformation of those knowledges). Aboriginal Australians also use Toyota four-wheel-drives to travel the Dreaming tracks, and cell phones to maintain traditional kinship links grounded in ties to country and law. Indigenous and non-Western peoples, as I wrote in a recent paper, "inhabit modernity not as an archaic remnant but as a fold, a complication of its singular but fractured and internally disparate time".[28]

But even apart from the possibilities it offers for creative transformation by indigenous or "traditional" cultures, the net opens up areas of information use that are potentially of immense utilitarian benefit in the non-Western world, and which we overlook if we understand the net on the model of recreation and the exploration of personal identity. I'm thinking in particular of the provision of education and skills training to remote or impoverished areas, and of online medical diagnosis in countries poorly equipped with medical services on the ground. The exploitation of these information resources is mostly still to come, but the systems exist which could dramatically alleviate illiteracy and disease amongst the wretched of the earth. Is this a "Western imposition"? I don't think so, Mr Deckard.

To step back from 2019 - by somewhat over 3,000 years - and return to our legendary Trojan horses: if we accept that within the bounds of the net, these beasts are able to run relatively free, galloping in many directions through this "network of networks", then it seems to me that this freedom, to a degree at least, derives from the paradigm of textuality supported by the network, one which is certainly far removed from the mainstream Western approach to textuality in the modern period. In your 1997 Time and Commodity Culture, you speak of the internet foreshadowing a major shift towards "the open-ended drift of a rhizomatic mode of reading intensely structured by desire and distraction".[29] The hyperlinked world wide web is often seen as promoting an anti-linear and anti-hierarchical ethos - favouring interconnection and entwining, as Sadie Plant indicates[30] - so that it is possible to (show)jump whimsically from text to text, never reading any one from beginning to end. Of course, it's not just reading that changes, but writing also; or perhaps we should say, reading and writing blur together, so that readership and authorship begin to collapse into one. Many would agree with Julian Dibbell's observation of "an irreversible diffusion of authorship throughout the social body,"[31] or Sherry Turkle's indication that in MUDs, "[a]uthorship is not only displaced from a solitary voice, it is exploded."[32] Texts, then, are easy to author, co-author, supplement and simply copy; in theory at least, leaving aside for a moment questions of R(eal) L(ife) access to economic and cultural capital, everyone can talk, and everyone can respond. This is in turn linked to what Howard Rheingold[33] and others promote and defend as the network (many-to-many) paradigm of communication, in opposition to the more traditional broadcast (one-to-many) form. As its supporters are only too well aware, however, the new paradigm does need to be promoted and defended; thus David Porush: "It is [the] moral toll of the idea of intellectual property - and which in fact the Internet as a vast collaborative writing exercise threatens to disrupt - which I would ask us to question."[34] For it is clear that beyond the internet, there are developments of a very different ilk currently underway - developments which threaten the viability of this free and easy attitude to authorship, readership, and communication - developments which, perhaps, threaten to pen the horses in again.

The key issue is that of ownership of information, and the legal structures which have crystallised around it. In Time and Commodity Culture, you discuss at some length the gradual erosion of the commons or public domain over several centuries, as a result of the increasing commodification associated with capitalist production. This has meant, amongst other things, the extension of property rights from the material to the immaterial realm, and hence the commodification of information which saw the introduction of copyright law. Moreover, it seems that now, in the electronic age, above and beyond the commodification of information itself, we are witnessing the commodification of access to that information.[35] The consequently emerging "global information order" which you are currently researching would, indeed, seem to be diametrically opposed to the idea of the free circulation of anonymously (co-)authored information on the net which is proposed and defended by many cultural observers. Can we expect great clashes between these two paradigms? How are such clashes likely to play themselves out? And where does this leave the horses?

Around the world, tens of thousands of corporations large and small, hundreds of thousands of corporate strategists, systems designers and intellectual property lawyers are putting all their time, skills and energies into devising ways of tapping the enormous and largely unrealised profit potential of the net. They want to build the fences that will enclose the electronic commons where the horses now roam more or less freely. Their power is immense. They own every legislature in the world. The US Digital Millennium Copyright Act,[36] the European draft Copyright Directive,[37] the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPs) provisions of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)[38] have shifted immaterial property rights substantially in their favour, extending the duration and reach of copyright, standardising patent law to the US model, giving unwarranted protection to software, and gradually but persistently encroaching on those domains - language, facts, mathematical algorithms, business methods, "nature" itself - which were previously exempt from private ownership. Even the technological infrastructure of the internet, which relies on transient copying from servers to computers and on proxy server caching, is at best only precariously protected by an "implied licence" for these operations to take place.[39] Organised resistance to the containment of user rights is ineffective, underfunded, and almost entirely excluded from the lobbying processes that control the formulation of legislation.[40]

Yet the non-organised resistance to it - the resistance of the users of the public domain in information, of the ordinary "diffuse authors" who neither understand nor respect the privatised control of information - is enormous. The culture of the net is a culture premised on the free availability of information and on habits of freely passing it around. It's a samizdat culture on a global scale, enabled by a technology of proliferation and of a decentralisation of transmission and reception that makes the policing of use extraordinarily difficult: ordinary users just don't see that there's a problem with swapping music files online. Just as the Soviet Union failed to control samizdat publishing by placing guards at the photocopying machines, so the guardians of copyright have little hope of enforcing their rights on the net.

There are two problems facing those who would commercialise the internet. The first is the problem of creating the scarcity that is the condition of economic profitability; information, unlike material resources, is abundant, and it is not diminished by use: to the contrary, the more freely available it is, the more value it creates. The second is that the technologies of electronic proliferation allow copying to be restricted only with great difficulty and at great expense. The Napster case is exemplary: the music industry's victory was purely pyrrhic because, as Eben Moglen put it in a recent article in The Nation:

almost all the sharing programs in existence can switch from official Napster to other sharing facilitators with a single click. And when they move, the music moves with them. Now, in the publicity barrage surrounding the decision, 60 million Napster users will find out about OpenNap, which cannot be sued or prohibited because, as free software, no one controls its distribution and any lawsuits would have to be brought against all its users worldwide. Suddenly, instead of a problem posed by one commercial entity that can be closed down or acquired, the industry will be facing the same technical threat, with no one to sue but its own customers. No business can survive by suing or harassing its own market.[41]

The traditional solution to the first of these problems (the creation of scarcity) has been intellectual property law, especially the copyright which protects and rewards the work of the creative author (which in practice largely means the rights of the film, music and publishing industries). The diffusion of authorship on the net and the breaking down of the model of one-to-many communication (a breakdown that Enzensberger predicted in the early 1970s before the technology was anywhere in sight)[42] make the model of copyright increasingly obsolete. What this means, however, is that corporations will increasingly turn to alternative solutions to the "problem" of enclosure. These solutions will be based on the law of contract and they will be enforced by means of electronic tollgates.[43]

The bases for the technology already exist in the tracking mechanisms that are or can be built into search engines. If altavista or google can scan through a million sites in one and a half seconds, it's child's play for them to record the visits that I make as I click onto websites. The technical difficulty lies in the extraction of a toll for these visits. At the moment the mechanisms are clumsy, involving voluntary credit card payments; only the pornography industry is actually making money from such voluntary service contracts. The breakthrough will come with the development of more reliable, more efficient, and more subtle methods of direct-debit digital payment, registered instantaneously as I link on to a website, which will bypass the need for voluntary decision. This breakthrough is close: under different names (CyberCash, DigiCash, E-Money, Clickshare, MPTP, etc.) the architecture, the protocols and the specifications for embedding in websites the information necessary to trigger payments are all well advanced.[44] Doubtless this technology will be offered to us as an enormous convenience for consumers, a new flourishing of cheap e-commerce for all; doubtless it will be accompanied by legislation criminalising "trespass" on websites, by encryption locks, and by tracking mechanisms feeding into centralised databases to enforce this enclosure. Contract will override the fair use provisions of copyright law.[45] We will be told what a bargain the system of digital micropayments will be: a cent, a tenth of a cent for the right of access to a site. But the sum of these micropayments - ensuring a "fair" return for the "creative" and "innovative" efforts of the "authors" of websites - will, on a global scale, make possible the profitable commercialisation of the net, and the end of the commons in electronic information as we know it.

So those are the battle lines. On the one hand, the combined power of corporations hungry to generate profit from the information resources of the net, and a global information order structured around property rights in information. On the other, an entrenched culture of users who are deeply resistant to the enclosure of the commons in electronic information. The play of forces is complex, not least because restriction of access to information is ultimately self-defeating: the energies and the creativity released by the net will not easily be contained. The hacker community and the community of open source software creators and users will figure out ways of cutting the electronic fences. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act may be found unconstitutional. Institutions dependent on the free flow of information - libraries, universities, the scientific community, even some parts of government - will have to work through a struggle between issues of principle and issues of commercial self-interest (and the recent decision by MIT [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] to make all its teaching materials freely available on the web[46] - a decision which has the capacity to cripple the emerging alliances between universities and commercial electronic publishers - may be a sign of how this struggle could go). Finally, the lack of a clear distinction between providers and users - the fact that most websites are not designed for profit but are part of a communal enterprise of information sharing - may restrict the viability of any system of digital micropayments, or may lead to a net with a two-tier (commercial and non-commercial) structure. Interesting times: but it's not unthinkable that we may now be seeing the beginning of the end of the golden age of the internet.

It strikes me that certain agents that might have been expected to feature in a major way in the foregoing discussion are conspicuous by their almost complete absence: namely, governments. Insofar as your mention legislatures, it is in terms of the ability of corporations to control them. This seems highly significant in and of itself.

The internet may well be exacerbating a trend that has long been underway. Nowadays, it is a relatively commonplace assertion that the power of nation states is declining, giving way to what might be called a transnational space dominated by corporate interests. This, claims Roger Clarke, was already anticipated in the 1980s by the cyberpunk novelists who "took as read the idea that governments were bit-players".[47] Our mistake, he suggests, was to assume, with Orwell, that governments somehow had the sole prerogative to increase surveillance and control of the general population.

"If governments were Hollywood caricatures, the average nation-state today might be a cross between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Woody Allen: a neurotic powerhouse worried about its own irrelevance and eager to show otherwise."[48] Thus writes Andrew Shapiro. On the other hand, Shapiro himself, along with numerous other critics, has shown that through their judiciary branches, governments do continue to exercise a very substantial amount of control on and via the internet, though this clearly varies from nation to nation. Such control largely revolves around the twin activities of censorship and surveillance.

Censorship of the net, like censorship of other media, is particularly heavy in many Asian countries such as China and Singapore, and in Middle Eastern lands such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and is mostly justified in the name of political stability and/or public morality. In Western Europe, a concern for regulating morality has led to famous recent court cases in Germany and France concerning the problems of blocking access to, respectively, pornography and Nazi memorabilia, and certainly there has been a great deal of debate on this subject in the US and other Western countries. At its limit, this debate runs up against the thorny issue of cyberhate - the sadistic or racist positions which, as you mentioned earlier, can theoretically be occupied without constraint on the net - and whether it can or should be regulated by law.

Regarding surveillance, Michael Heim issues this warning: "While matrix users feel geographical and intellectual distances melt away, the price they pay is their ability to initiate uncontrolled and unsupervised activity."[49] Recently, the US government, like many Western governments, has been grappling with the question of how to maintain and even increase the internet reach of its intelligence gathering and law enforcement agencies, ostensibly with the aim of promoting public protection and safety. Such surveillance boils down to monitoring people's data trails on the net - a simple matter, as you suggested in your answer to the last question - and so much more cost-effective, says Roger Clarke, than actually sitting watching those same people.[50]

There is little doubt that corporations are equally capable of internet censorship and surveillance, though the latter, as you have implied above, is likely to be of more interest to them in extracting capital from the net. Add to this their multinational character (which often places them beyond national jurisdictions), economic clout (which often renders governments partially dependent on them for regional and national economic prosperity), and their already mentioned hunger to generate profit from the net, and we're face to face with some rather formidable players.

Tellingly, governments have already begun to come into conflict with corporations, most famously in the drawn-out boxing match between the US government and Microsoft. This case may be viewed as an aberration, a government dealing with a particularly large and unwieldy corporation. Or it may be viewed as a sign of the times, the most powerful government, perhaps, in the history of the world, coming into conflict with what many view as the most powerful corporation in the world ... a corporation which happens to deal in computer software ... including net software. In that case, this may well be the first of many showdowns.

How much power do governments really have to censor, survey and ultimately control their citizens via the internet, and is their power declining relative to that of corporations? Is the politically constituted "USA" less important than the trademark "Microsoft" to net surfers in an increasingly globalised world? Finally, and perhaps very optimistically, do governments or international political organisations have any role to play in - and are they capable of - protecting citizens' interests over and against those of corporations?

The received wisdom is that the net's distributed architecture - the packet-switching technique that routes messages around "damage" - makes censorship difficult to the point of impossibility. But, as you say, censorship happens: by restrictions on service providers in China and Singapore, by the use of electronic filters screening "indecent" trigger-words (with all the problems this causes people living in Sussex and Scunthorpe), or by the restriction of physical access to small elites (the Saudi Arabian and Indonesian solution - not unlike the two-tier censorship we used to have in the West, which allowed art-films and art-novels to represent sex while banning it from mass-circulation texts).

Both states and corporations have incentives to control the use of the net, but their interests are specific and separate: for states, interests in security and public order; for corporations, in making profits both directly and indirectly from cyberspace. Models of regulation based on print don't work well for the net, because of its speed and complexity and because it crosses national boundaries - hence the jurisdictional conflict between French law and US First Amendment protections in the Yahoo hate-speech case. The simpler and more attractive alternative for states is to hardwire constraints and identifiers into the technology. One solution is to build filters into the HTML language itself, as in the case of the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS), which provides labelling and rating for all web pages along a range of parameters and which is being proposed as an industry standard.[51] Content filters operate in many school systems and public libraries and "voluntarily" in many homes, and again have the capacity to be generalised as and when they are adopted by service providers. Data tracking and the centralised control of encryption codes similarly have the potential to enhance government surveillance, and without the necessity of formulating legislation or conducting continuous scrutiny of individual users, since profiling and the monitoring of trigger words do the job automatically.[52]

For corporations, the challenge is to protect intellectual property rights and to control the sale and afterlife of electronic products. The identity codes built into Intel's Pentium 3 chips - swiftly disavowed after the public outcry, but never adequately covered by quick-fix patches[53] - will greatly facilitate the construction of comprehensive consumer databases, and electronic tolls based on micropayment technologies will at once extract an invisible and immediate rent from websites, and make it easier to track the movements of users. Corporations, of course, also have security interests, some of which, like guarding against industrial espionage or cyberfraud, are legitimate, others of which, like subjecting employees' use of the web and email to close scrutiny, are more dubious; the marketing of surveillance software to companies is now a major industry in its own right.

Both sets of technological solutions are at an early stage of development and implementation (although they're further advanced than many people realise); both have profound implications for privacy, and they are potentially convergent as mechanisms of surveillance - since, at another level of analysis, the interests of states and the interests of corporations cannot simply be opposed to each other. It is states that construct and maintain the property rights, the regulatory and fiscal regimes, and the market structures that allow corporations to make profits; the intersection of interests at the level of the military-industrial complex and the telecoms means that much "state" espionage is now directed towards the industrial and commercial activities of corporations based in other states - the EU is at the moment deeply concerned about the role of Project Echelon, run jointly by the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, in using its vast information-gathering facilities, including the routine hoovering up of internet transmissions, to give a commercial advantage to the US aerospace industry (as well as allegedly to spy on organisations like Amnesty International).[54] It's also the case, however, that state anti-trust or competition policy can (as in the case of Microsoft) constrain corporations, and this is merely - but importantly - to say that states represent a play of contradictory interests and of sectoral struggles between their different branches, and are never simply the tools of corporations. (But watch how fast Dubya Bush moves now to get Microsoft off the hook.)

At the international level, the United States has moved to keep this play of interests to a minimum. The major regulatory bodies - the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) - were crafted specifically to enforce and enhance the rights of capital over intellectual property. Although historically both the European and the Anglo-American intellectual property regimes began by designing copyright and patents as transient and limited monopolies whose purpose was to encourage creativity and the enrichment of the public domain, in practice the new global information regime favours monopoly over common ownership, the fencing rather than the opening of the commons in information. This move towards enclosure is greatly assisted by the ignorance of politicians and journalists about the issues; the British Parliament has debated intellectual property matters exactly twice in the last twenty years, and the press regards them as "technical" issues of no broad public relevance. Freedom of Information legislation may open up some areas of legislative activity to scrutiny, but doesn't affect the more general domain of "private" information (and in any case it always has loopholes, both for matters of national security and, certainly in the UK, for "commercial in confidence" information).

It's difficult - especially when you take into account the enormous lobbying powers of the major industries - to see how governments and regulatory bodies can be brought to shift sides on these issues. It's nevertheless important as a matter of principle not to see states as monolithic entities, and to recognise that the struggle for openness happens at and between every level of legislative, bureaucratic, and judicial practice. In the same way, censorship and surveillance shouldn't be seen - as they so often are in the libertarian culture of the net - as unproblematic evils. As Stanley Fish says, there's no such thing as free speech (and it's a good thing too):[55] the net makes possible money-laundering, electronic embezzlement, child pornography, and hate speech, and states have both the right and the responsibility to deal with these things (although the question of hate speech is genuinely tricky). In one sense the problem is not surveillance in itself, but how to keep it democratically accountable. In another sense, however, what's problematic is not so much the political as the moral dimension of depersonalised scrutiny: unlike the gaze of the human Other, panoptic scrutiny is a gaze that cannot be returned.

During the course of this email conversation over the last couple of months, we've covered a lot of terrain, touching on many of the most volatile contemporary debates as well as important issues of the recent past. We've spoken of identity and selfhood, gender and race, economic and cultural capital and the digital divide, the East, the West and the USA, copyright and the global information order, censorship and surveillance, corporations and governments, loci of power and loci of resistance ... not forgetting, of course, New York(er) dogs and Trojan horses.

Sandy Stone, one of the foremost early theorists of gender, identity and the net,[56] said to me in an email earlier this year that she felt there was very little new left to write about the area that she had helped to pioneer. Do you feel that there is much left to say, more generally, about the internet and power relations, or are we just rehearsing old arguments? Beyond that, what exactly is the role of cultural critics in talking about the internet, or for that matter any other aspect of the contemporary sociocultural landscape? Words, words, words, Prince Hamlet said. Does our talking make a difference? And if so, where does the conversation go from here?

Or "information overload", as the same Prince Hamlet also said. Maybe the role we have is not so much to find new things to say as to pull things together and to publicise and evaluate the array of arguments. Because the net is structurally dispersed there's never a single conversation going on, even among the small community of net critics. Part of what I've enjoyed about our discussion has been the way we've pulled in technical matters, questions of law, questions of politics and power, and questions of symbolic interaction. The most and the least that a conversation like this can do is to make linkages between these fields, and beyond that to link to broader activist communities whose starting point is the net but who then follow the logic of its contradictions into the political domain. But these communities aren't just out there waiting for us to contact them: they're transient, fragile, vulnerable to erosion. They have to be formed and sustained; we have to sustain them.

And where the conversation goes from here ... is out there.

Notes

[1] D. Porush, "Telepathy: Alphabetic Consciousness and the Age of Cyborg Illiteracy" in J. Broadhurst Dixon & E.J. Cassidy (eds), Virtual Futures: Cyberotics, Technology and Post-Human Pragmatism. London: Routledge, 1998, pp.45-64.

[2] A. Shapiro, "The Disappearance of Cyberspace and the Rise of Code", September 1998, p.1, at: https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/works/shapiro/disappearance.pdf (15 May 2001). Shapiro's account, though ironic, makes clear certain important similarities between the alphabet and the internet as communication tools.

[3] RAND, "Transcendental Destination: Where Will the Information Revolution Lead?" in RAND Review, vol.24, no.2, fall 2000, p.13, at: https://www.rand.org/publications/randreview/issues/rr.12.00/rrfall2000.pdf (15 May 2001).

[4] For information on the Los Alamos Archive, now the major publishing site for many areas of physics, see K. Hafner, "Physics on the Web is Putting Science Journals on the Line", 21 April 1998, at: https://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilkins/links/21peer.html (15 May 2001).

[5] The cartoon and caption, both by Peter Steiner, appeared in The New Yorker magazine in July 1993.

[6] N. Stephenson, Snow Crash. London: Penguin, 1994, p.33; this novel was originally published in the USA by Bantam in 1992.

[7] M. Underwood, "Wired Women: Lost (or Found?) in Cyberspace" in Journal of Religion and Society, vol.1, 1999, at: https://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/1999/1999-5.html (15 May 2001).

[8] A. Bruckman, "Gender Swapping on the Internet", talk given to The Internet Society, San Francisco, 1993, at: ftp://ftp.cc.gatech.edu/pub/people/asb/papers/gender-swapping.txt (15 May 2001).

[9] S. Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Touchstone, 1995, p.261.

[10] M. Underwood, supra note 7.

[11] D. Dietrich, "(Re)-Fashioning the Techno-Erotic Woman: Gender and Textuality in the Cybercultural Matrix" in S.G. Jones (ed.), Virtual Culture. London: SAGE, 1997, pp.169-184.

[12] See for example S. Herring, "Gender and Democracy in Computer-Mediated Communication" in The Electronic Journal of Communication/La Revue Electronique de Communication, vol.3, no.2, April 1993, also available at: https://dc.smu.edu/dc/classroom/Gender.txt (15 May 2001); "Gender Differences in Computer-Mediated Communication: Bringing Familiar Baggage to the New Frontier", talk given at American Library Association Annual Convention, Miami, June 27, 1994, also available at: https://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/gender/herring.txt (15 May 2001); [co-authored with D.A. Johnson & T. DiBenedetto] "'This Discussion is Going Too Far!' Male Resistance to Female Participation on the Internet" in K. Hall and M. Bucholtz (eds), Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self. New York: Routledge, 1995, pp.67-96; "Posting in a Different Voice: Gender and Ethics in Computer-Mediated Communication" in C. Ess (ed.), Philosophical Approaches to Computer-Mediated Communication. Albany: SUNY, 1996, pp.115-145; "The Rhetorical Dynamics of Gender Harassment On-Line" in L.J. Gurak (ed.), "The Rhetorics of Gender in Computer-Mediated Communication", special edition of The Information Society, vol.15, no.3, 1999, pp.151-167, at: https://www.slis.indiana.edu/TIS/articles/herring15(3).pdf (15 May 2001); "Gender Differences in CMC: Findings and Implications" in The CPSR Newsletter, vol.18, no.1, winter 2000, at: https://www.cpsr.org/publications/newsletters/issues/2000/Winter2000/herring.html (15 May 2001).

[13] See for example C. Kramarae [co-authored with H.J. Taylor], "Women and Men on Electronic Networks: A Conversation or a Monologue?" in H.J. Taylor, C. Kramarae & M. Ebben (eds), Women, Information Technology, and Scholarship. Urbana: Center for Advanced Studies, 1993, pp.52-61; "A Backstage Critique of Virtual Reality" in S.G. Jones (ed.), CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1995, pp.36-56; "Technology Policy, Gender, and Cyberspace" in Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy, vol.4, spring 1997, pp.149-158, at: https://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?4+Duke+J.+Gender+L.+&+Pol'y+149 ( 15 May 2001).

[14] S. Herring, "Gender Differences in Computer-Mediated Communication", supra note 12.

[15] L. Nakamura, Abstract of "Passing Fancies: Identity Tourism on the Internet", talk given at Annual Meeting of PAMLA, University of California, November 1996, at: https://www.hnet.uci.edu/English/ETC/nakamura.html (15 May 2001); see also "Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet" in Works and Days 25/26 , vol.13.1-2, 1995, pp.181-193, also available at: https://www.humanities.uci.edu/mposter/syllabi/readings/nakamura.html (15 May 2001); and "'Where Do You Want to Go Today?' Cybernetic Tourism, the Internet, and Transnationality" in B.E. Kolko, L. Nakamura & G.B. Rodman (eds), Race in Cyberspace. New York: Routledge, 2000, pp.1-14.

[16] J. Martinez, "A Social Vision of the Internet and Public Policies: Ideas on Strategies for Bringing Civil Society's Influence to Bear", 6 September 2000, working paper for the 2000 meeting, International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, at: https://www.idrc.ca/pan/panlacjulaant_e.PDF (15 May 2001).

[17] H. Thimbleby, "Personal Boundaries / Global Stage" in First Monday, vol.3, no.3, 2 March 1998, at: https://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_3/thimbleby/ (15 May 2001).

[18] M. Hall, "Africa Connected" in First Monday, vol.3, no.11, 2 November 1998, at: https://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_11/hall/index.html (15 May 2001). Significantly, Hall takes a rather different perspective when revisiting these themes three years later in "Straylight, Mala Mala, Pink Frikkie, Blekgelexy and Rumba Kali @ Africa", in the current issue of Mots Pluriels, at: https://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/MP1801mh.html (1 August 2001).

[19] M. Hall, "Africa Connected", supra note 18.

[20] U. Eco interviewed in L. Marshall, "The World According to Eco" in Wired, vol.5, no.3, March 1997, at: https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.03/ff_eco.html?pg=2&topic= (15 May 2001).

[21] B. Ebo (ed.), Cyberimperialism? Global Relations in the New Electronic Frontier. Westport: Praeger, 2000.

[22] T. Bennett, M. Emmison & J. Frow, Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p.205.

[23] T. Bennett, M. Emmison & J. Frow, Accounting for Tastes, supra note 22, esp. pp.224-225.

[24] J. Lockard, "Resisting Cyber-English" in Bad Subjects, issue 24, February 1996, at: https://eserver.org/bs/24/lockard.html (15 May 2001).

[25] J. Lockard, "Virtual Whiteness and Narrative Diversity" in Undercurrent, no.4, spring 1996, at: https://www.uoregon.edu/~ucurrent/uc4/4-lockard.html (15 May 2001); see also the updated French version of this article, "Blancheur virtuelle et diversité narrative", in the forthcoming issue of Mots Pluriels (no.19, October 2001).

[26] Z. Sardar, "alt.civilizations.faq: Cyberspace as the Darker Side of the West" in D. Bell & B.M. Kennedy (eds), The Cybercultures Reader. London: Routledge, 2000, p.736; this essay was originally published in Z. Sardar & J. Ravetz (eds), Cyberfutures: Culture and Politics on the Information Superhighway. London: Pluto, 1996, pp.14-41.

[27] E. Michaels, "For a Cultural Future: Francis Jupurrurla Makes Television at Yuendumu" in Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1995, pp.99-125.

[28] J. Frow, "A Politics of Stolen Time" in J. May and N. Thrift (eds), Timespace: Geographies of Temporality. London: Routledge, 2001, p.73.

[29] J. Frow, Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997, p.20.

[30] S. Plant, Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture. London: Fourth Estate, 1997, p.186.

[31] J. Dibbell, "The Writer à la Modem: Or, The Death of the Author on the Installment Plan", at: https://www.levity.com/julian/alamodem.html (15 May 2001); this essay was originally published as "Let's Get Digital" in The Voice Literary Supplement, March 1993.

[32] S. Turkle, "Constructions and Reconstructions of Self in Virtual Reality: Playing in the MUDs" in Mind, Culture, and Activity, vol.1, no.3, summer 1994, also available at: https://web.mit.edu/sturkle/www/constructions.html (15 May 2001); cf. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Touchstone, 1995), where Turkle phrases the same idea slightly differently: "... the solitary author is displaced and distributed" (p.185).

[33] H. Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Revised ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000, esp. ch. 9 & 10, pp.255-322; these chapters are also available at: https://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/9.html (15 May 2001) and https://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/10.html (15 May 2001) respectively.

[34] D. Porush, "Internet, Samiszdat [sic] and Hypocrisy", at: https://members.global2000.net/~dporush/HTML%20Files/Internet,Samizdat,Hypocrisy.html (15 February 2001).

[35] J. Frow, "Gift and Commodity" in Time and Commodity Culture, supra note 29, pp.102-217.

[36] See "Digital Millennium Copyright Act", 8 October 1998, at: https://www.loc.gov/copyright/legislation/hr2281.pdf (15 May 2001).

[37] See "Save the Web", at: https://www.savetheweb.org/eu.htm (15 May 2001).

[38] See WTO, "TRIPS Material on the WTO Website", at: https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/trips_e.htm (15 May 2001).

[39] H. MacQueen, "Copyright on the Internet" in L. Edwards and C. Waelde (eds), Law and the Internet: A Framework for Electronic Commerce. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2000, pp.195-196 and 202.

[40] See J. Litman, "Copyright and Information Policy" in Law and Contemporary Problems, vol.55, no.2, 1992, pp.185-209.

[41] E. Moglen, "Liberation Musicology" in The Nation, 12 March 2001, at: https://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010312&s=moglen (15 May 2001).

[42] H.M. Enzensberger, "Constituents of a Theory of Media" in The Consensus Industry: On Literature, Politics and the Media. New York: Seabury, 1974.

[43] H. MacQueen, "Copyright on the Internet", supra note 39, p.223.

[44] See, for example, the overview and links in T. Michel/W3C, "Micropayments Overview", 10 May 2001, at: https://www.w3.org/ECommerce/Micropayments/Overview.html#About) (15 May 2001).

[45] This is already explicit in Article 10 of the 1996 World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) Treaty, which allows reproduction "in certain special circumstances, provided that such exploitation does not conflict with normal exploitation of the work and does not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the author". The full text is available on the WIPO website, at: https://www.wipo.org/ (15 May 2001).

[46] See MIT, "MIT to Make Nearly All Course Materials Available Free on the World Wide Web", 4 April 2001, at: https://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/2001/ocw.html (15 May 2001).

[47] R. Clarke, "While You Were Sleeping ... Surveillance Technologies Arrived" in Australian Quarterly, vol.73, no.1, January-February 2001, also available at: https://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/AQ2001.html (15 May 2001).

[48] A. Shapiro, The Control Revolution. New York: Century Foundation, 1999, p.63.

[49] M. Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993; the relevant chapter, "The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace", is also available at: https://www.rochester.edu/College/FS/Publications/HeimErotic.html (15 May 2001).

[50] R. Clarke, "While You Were Sleeping ...", supra note 47.

[51] See W3C, "Platform for Internet Content Selection", at: https://www.w3.org/PICS/ (15 May 2001).

[52] My thinking throughout this section is informed by James Boyle's essay "Foucault in Cyberspace: Surveillance, Sovereignty, and Hard-Wired Censors", 1997, at: https://james-boyle.com/ (15 May 2001).

[53] The story, together with a range of others on related issues, can be found at the Center for Democracy and Technology, at: https://www.cdt.org/digsig/ (15 May 2001).

[54] See D. Tal/The Golem, "Project Echelon", 16/17 November 1999, at: https://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/29/038.html (15 May 2001).

[55] S. Fish, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, And It's A Good Thing Too. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

[56] See for example A.R. (Sandy) Stone, "Will The Real Body Please Stand Up? Boundary Stories About Virtual Cultures" in M. Benedikt (ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991, pp.81-118, also available at: https://www.rochester.edu/College/FS/Publications/StoneBody.html (15 May 2001); "Violation and Virtuality: Two Cases of Physical and Psychological Boundary Transgression and their Implications", 1993, at: https://sandystone.com/violation-and-virtuality (15 May 2001); "What Vampires Know: Transsubjection and Transgender in Cyberspace" in E. Ursprung (ed.), In Control: Mensch-Interface-Maschine. Graz: Kunstverein W.A.S., 1994, with the original 1993 talk also available at: https://sandystone.com/eyes-of-the-vampire (15 May 2001); "Sex and Death Among the Disembodied: VR, Cyberspace, and the Nature of Academic Discourse" in S.L. Star (ed.), The Culture of Computing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp.243-255; The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.

Mark Pegrum

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