Ephemera

Splinternet is an irregular report from Ephemera. Once upon a time, we thought of the Internet as like the Wild West; anarchic and mostly empty. The dream of the World Wide Web was ‘all of the world’s knowledge, at all the world’s fingertips’. But this dream has failed to materialize. As Scott Malcomson says in his book ‘Splinternet’, from which I’ve taken the title of this series: “the Internet is cracking apart into discrete groups no longer willing, or able, to connect.” The Internet’s “destructive creativity”, born from Silicon Valley libertarianism, must be tamed. China’s solution has been to retreat from the World Wide Web and create a parallel Chinese Internet, which will soon dwarf the English one. In Russia, the mafia state pairs the Chinese panopticon with extralegal violence against the media.   Want a better handle on the idea of the “splinternet”? Here’s a quick and good tv interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZJSRR66teM Here’s a cool 1-hr tv doc on Russia’s “Creepy, Innovative Internet” f