Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

On her book Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics

Cover Interview of March 16, 2009

In a nutshell

The Internet is a technology based on control systems, yet it is also a mass medium celebrated as fostering personal and political freedom. How? Why? What dreams and desires drove the Internet’s transformation from a communications network used mainly by academics and the military to an integral part of everyday life? And how does the experience of actually using the Internet differ from the hype that surrounds it?

Driven by these questions, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics argues that a strange coupling of control and freedom has been central to Internet’s emergence as a commercial mass medium. This coupling is also prevalent in the broader U.S. political landscape: we are only free, we are told, if we are in control, if the gates that surround us hold. To secure this freedom, political problems are re-written as technological ones and pre-emption over-rides prevention, spreading paranoia everywhere. Because our technologies always fail, we must be paranoid to be somewhat secure. This constant failure of technology, however, also points to an alternate path, one that understands that control can never secure freedom and that freedom, rather than resulting from control, makes control possible, necessary, and never enough.

So, importantly, Control and Freedom denigrates neither the Internet nor freedom. Rather, it argues that the Internet’s potential for democracy stems not from illusory promises of individual empowerment, but rather from the ways in which it exposes us to others, and to other machines. That is, from the way it exposes to a freedom we cannot control. To exploit this potential, we need to engage all layers of the Internet—hardware, software, interface, and extra-medial representation—to see where the gaps lie and to understand the differences between technological and social control.

philosophy / media studies / america / sexuality / gender / race / technology / security / advertising / political participation /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009