Lecture: Cyberspace Is Not a Place

In the 1980 and 1990s some SF writers, and many libertarians and futurists, spun utopian visions of the freedoms that would be enabled by the Net. Countless programmers, including myself, saw meaning in their everyday work as the building of this new and open space. More recently, uprisings in several countries – beginning with Egypt's Tahrir Square -- have used social media to such effect that noted journalist Paul Mason has claimed that the new gesture of revolution is not the raised fist but the upraised mobile-phone camera. But as the fates of the Arab Spring and of activists such as Snowden, Assange and Manning indicate, state power and class interests over-ride digital freedom. And the state of online culture shows daily that social freedom remains contested ground, to the extent that all our work and idealism has only served to build a global panopticon prison of surveillance and self-disclosure that endangers freedom to an unprecendented degree.
Can this be resisted and if so, how?

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Day: 2015-11-07
Start time: 14:30
Duration: 01:00
Room: Stora Hörsalen
Track: Keynote

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