Project 2 Draft

In The Master Switch Wu tells a cautionary tale about a potential future of society. He deals mainly with the corporate America side to the future, showing how with huge mega-corporations in control, could lead to the potential downfall of our basic human rights. Gibson in Neuromancer tells a little different of a tale. Neuromancer shows us a world where many of our rights are taken away but not in the same way. Neuromancer is a scary depiction of what our future may become. From simstim implants to cyberspace this shows us the fate to which we all may come to one day. However startling both futures may be Wu seems to be onto something. Looking around at Richmond’s campus today you can see his vision coming true everywhere. From block flash player on my iphone to the censored Internet on campus we can see the cycle prevalent so many places we look. However different these two ideas about the future of our society may be they also tie in together almost perfectly. They both deal with the dependence that a society has or will have on the Internet or “cyberspace.” Gibson shows us more how we can be affected from it and Wu is more with the effects of who has the power to control that medium which we are so dependent on.

One of Wu’s stronger points through out The Master Switch was that with the new medium of the internet the power behind it is too great to be placed in the hands of one major company or even several company’s and the larger corporations get a handle on the information outlet then in the end they will censor towards their best interest. As evident at the very end of The Master Switch the Internet is much too powerful of a device. “This time is different: with everything on one network, the potential power to control is so much greater.” (Wu,pg 318) 

This wary prediction, that once someone get control of the Internet the control over our society will be unimaginable is a fair assumption.

When looking at opinions and beliefs about the future this fear is up there as the scariest. The short story When "Sysadimns Ruled the Earth" by Cory Doctorow is another fictional representation of what will happen if we place so much power in the hands of one device, the Internet.

“We are in charge of the most important organizational and governmental tool the world has ever seen.” (pg 22  When sysadimins ruled the earth)

While this is only a fictional story about a small group of people who after a nuclear attack strive to keep the Internet alive, its still holds some importance and we can look to this story as well as a foreshadowing of what happens when we put so much into one thing. In the story it also explains as well how the “bad” guys in the story organized and pulled together in order to destroy the world. The quote above is exactly what Wu is talking about and what he fears. He fears that since the Internet and the network is becoming so powerful and such a controlling force that if the power to control it gets in the hands of the wrong people then it could be detrimental to the world. The Internet, which is a place where all your media can go, is a fountain of information and of power.

“The Internet by 2010 had become a fledgling universal network for all types of data: phone calls, video and television, data, a potential replacement for every single information industry of the twentieth century.” (Wu, 256) In this passage for the most part Wu was merely trying to suggest how the Internet had become to this day, however if you think about Wu is foreshadowing a scary but yet exciting future as well. A future where every piece of intellectual property can be found on one medium and which would be in essence, the center of many peoples lives. 

Imagine all of time people could save going to one place for pretty much everything. You can already see this happening with schools who are switching their teaching methods to involve students with their own laptops which have all of their textbooks uploaded directly to it. In many ways the world is already evolving the way Wu predicted it. Practically all of my friends have some version of a smart phone where we have not only texting and calling but internet, email, games and much, much more. The scary thing is what happens when this fails or service goes out? Would our society be able to continue on with out the Internet?

In Neuromancer we see through out the book Case’s punishment in the beginning and reward in the end is essentially access to the brain-computer interface to access the global computer network. In the quote from Neuromancer it is referencing the loss of the access to Cyperspace.

“For Case, who lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the fall…The body was meat.” (Gibson, 6)

This passage indicates that you aren’t anything with out the connection to cyberspace and that source of information, you just “meat.” What a scary though that you couldn’t be anything with out the Internet, that you had no substance. This also can be considered an extreme case even in Neuromancer because Case was a cowboy who devoted a majority of his life towards cyberspace. I’m sure that if you go out into society today you could find people who, if you took away the Internet than their whole identity would be stripped from them but that’s not really the point. The point is that if society gets to the where people could take away that access by damaging your physical being we’ve sunk to a new low. This ties in with Wu’s fear about the major corporations gaining control of the information outlets than they might have the power to take away that outlet for their own personal gain. You can see this today through Chinas privacy and Internet laws. While they’re not damaging their citizens physical being to keep them off the Internet I’m going to speculate to say that who know what would happen to those people if we had a system from Neuromancer. Would the Chinese government go as far as permanently damaging their citizen’s minds in order to keep them out of Cyperspace? Well never know but the future that Wu predicts shows how in many cases the power hungry mega empires will not stop at anything in order to get ahead of the competition and keep their revenues high. For the most part these huge corporations don’t even care about the betterment of society and promotion the development of future inventions. When Steve Case, CEO and president of AOL was asked if would do anything differently regarding the merger between AOL and Time Warner his thoughts were. “Case has a different vision in hindsight: “I would have bought Google.” (Wu, 268) Case doesn’t go through the process and think to himself I really should have come up with a product which was as revolutionary as Google. No he simple wanted to shut the process down. 

This behavior is a startling vision of what’s to come in our future. A future where copyrights are abundant and Mega corporations control the airwaves. With the way the Internet is headed this is a very probable assumption for he future. Just looking at Apples products which have almost a cult following and yet we see their company closing their products off more and more to the public. However I feel if we take some action and the general public speaks out and will not stand for this then something can be done. We need to keep the Internet a free and open medium where many people’s creative juices flow naturally.  And while having all of your information on one super network as we’ve seen in Gibson tale of the future that isn’t always necessarily a good thing. We need to make sure were careful as to how dependent we get on the Internet because one day we could wake up and our minds are messed up permanently in order to keep us from accessing information out there. Gibson and Wu are very much related in this aspect because both show how unless we change something soon if we don’t break this dependency then this is what the future holds. A future of censoring and restrictions, the type of future which is terrifies me to this day.  

                                                                   Work Cited:

Wu, Tim. The Master Switch: the Rise and Fall of Information Empires. London: Atlantic, 2010. Print.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 2004. Print.