despite its fascistic undertones, I really loved that movie ... but Orson Card's Xenocide is better, as it creates sympathy for the Other ... you are right Kevin, this is a vision of a hierarchically controlled internet .. Michel On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 5:04 AM, Kevin Carson < [email protected]> wrote:

When I watched Starship Troopers again recently, it occurred to me that the "Federal Network" newsreel formats were reminiscent of a pre-Tim Berners-Lee, pre-Web vision of the Internet as a "Information Superhighway" full of streaming content. It's as if access to the Internet is mediated entirely by AOL -- but an AOL designed by Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes.

As a matter of fact the reason I watched the movie again was that I recently read a piece by Mike Masnick speculating on what the Web (if it could even be called that) would have looked like had TBL patented the hyperlink. He said access to the hyperlinked Web would be mediated entirely by walled-garden Internet services like AOL or web portals like Yahoo that could afford to pay royalties. This made me think of those Federal Network newsreels with the "Would you like to know more?" hyperlinks embedded in them.

Comments? -- Kevin Carson Research Associate, Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective

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