Rad Geek People's Daily

official state media for a secessionist republic of one

The Battle for a Grassroots Internet Experience

Here's a pretty old legacy post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 23 years ago, in 2001, on the World Wide Web.

Jon Katz writes an interesting article on the battle between corporate power and individual creativity on the Internet in Technology And The Fast Food Nation [Slashdot]. I am a bit tired of all these apocalyptic Woe is me, AOHell will take us over articles when so much of the Internet experience can be and is being defined by brilliant and revolutionary bottom-up forums like, well, Slashdot, and the Independent Media Centers, and FreeSpeech Internet Television, and Blogger, and even the user-community aspects of big corporate sites like Amazon.com and Salon.com. This is a battle that we can easily win, if we keep up the kind of decentralized networks that these tools allow and promote them. Of more concern, of course, is the continuing amalgamation and control of Internet access points through corproate mergers and sweetheart telecom legislation. What can we start doing to reverse this? We need to start looking towards microfinance to keep small entrepreneurs afloat. We also need to look to building guerilla network infrastructures such as are already beginning to crop up, and making these infrastructures accessible to people other than hardcore geeks. And, of course, we need to work at the legislative level to oppose the continuing progress of corporate privilege and corporate power over telecommunications. The best part about these bottom-up Internet technologies is that they may provide a key component of creating the political and economic networks we need to make all this a reality.

Reply to The Battle for a Grassroots Internet Experience Use a feed to Follow replies to this article

Post a reply

By:
Your e-mail address will not be published.
You can register for an account and sign in to verify your identity and avoid spam traps.
Reply

Use Markdown syntax for formatting. *emphasis* = emphasis, **strong** = strong, [link](http://xyz.com) = link,
> block quote to quote blocks of text.

This form is for public comments. Consult About: Comments for policies and copyright details.

Anticopyright. This was written in 2001 by Rad Geek. Feel free to reprint if you like it. This machine kills intellectual monopolists.