Future Tense

Entrepreneurs, businesses, NGOs, and governments exalt mobile technology as a game-changing tool to fight global poverty. But what if our eagerness to connect the world is inadvertently exacerbating the global economic divide?

New technologies are making it easier than ever to turn an idea into a reality. 3D printers, open-source software, hackable products, and collaborative communities have turned traditional tinkering into a full-scale “maker movement” that allows – and encourages – everyone to tap into their inner entrepreneur. Can this movement usher in a new age of innovation? Will hackers have a profound impact on the economy? And if so, is the system ready to deal with it?

On January 23, Evgeny Morozov wrote an article for Future Tense called “Warning: This Site Contains Conspiracy Theories” which proposes the notion that search engines should label and flag websites that engage in discourse about the potential link ...

I knew perfectly well that my idea was unrealistic at the time; close to cyber-utopia, a term developed by the young and prolific Evgeny Morozov in his book “The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate The World“. However, last year I discovered that my idea ...

But don't tell that to Evgeny Morozov, Stanford visiting scholar, author of The Net Delusion, and the man responsible for the Feb. 4 New York Times op-ed "The Death of the Cyberflâneur." Morozov is an educated man, and with nuance and skill, ...

"Google attempted to run a search engine in China, and they ended up giving up," says MacKinnon, a senior fellow at New America Foundation, a Washington, DC, think tank. Internet companies that set up inside China are expected to delete objectionable ...

I was particularly befuddled by Evgeny Morozov's “The Death of the Cyberflaneur,” which takes the discussion in a direction . . . you wouldn't expect. Morozov laments the passing of what he calls the “cyberflaneur” (actually the term was coined on a ...

The other day, while I was rummaging through a stack of oldish articles on the future of the Internet, an obscure little essay from 1998 — published, of all places, on a Web site called Ceramics Today — caught my eye. Celebrating the rise of the “cyberflâneur,” it painted a bright digital future, brimming with playfulness, intrigue and serendipity, that awaited this mysterious online type. This vision of tomorrow seemed all but inevitable at a time when “what the city and the street were to the Flâneur, the Internet and the Superhighway have become to the Cyberflâneur.”

... Feb 4 Joly sez, "Rebecca Mackinnon discusses her new book 'Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom' (Basic Books) with Mark Whitaker, managing editor for CNN Worldwide, at The New America Foundation NYC on Feb 1 2012.

In many ways, MacKinnon's book is the one Evgeny Morozov should have written, if he was more interested in building a sensible movement for Internet freedom rather than conducting scorched-earth warfare against people who believe the Internet can help ...