Wired
Well, this chapter focused on making it abundantly clear that the network of corporate/political alliances that arose through the pages of WIRED during the first five years of the magazine had long reaching effects on the shape that the web and its attendant technologies assumed. Basically the web and the world look the way they do because of the affiliations between the ideological and technical impressions that that WIRED gang penned and partnered with actual politicians that were socially conservative and had their hands in creating legislation that would make the development of various technologies and the corporate structures from which they issued free to do as they wanted. Esther Dyson and Newt Gingrich go on to write “The Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age” which later becomes the guiding principle to Gingrich’s efforts (successful) to deregulate the telecommunications industry. People want to make money and want to feel free to do so – without any legislative restrictions to hold them accountable to the means by which they do so – and to ward off any socially inspired pangs of conflict over what they do. Gingrich and his political base to render, in absolute terms, personal freedoms with corporate deregulation, utilized the “Magna Carta” that these two created. This document was like a Manifest Destiny for the “frontier of cyberspace” and in my impression replicates much of what American exceptionalism is about – that entrepreneurial and vigilante sensibility specific to the business individualism that stands in for the idea of freedom.
