"

The reason cities have been engines of economic growth is that young people move to them, to make new ways of being. Taking advantage of the fact that the city is where you escape the surveillance of the village, and the social control of the farm. “How you gonna keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paris?” was a fair question in 1919 and it had a lot do with the way the 20th century worked in the United States. The city is the historical system for the production of anonymity and the ability to experiment autonomously in ways of living. We are closing it…

…The browser made the Web very easy to read… we did not make the Web easy to write. So a little thug in a hooded sweatshirt made the Web easy to write, and created a man in the middle attack on human civilization, which is unrolling now to an enormous music of social harm…

…if we’d had a little bit more disintermediated innovation, if we had made running your own web-server very easy, if we had explained to people from the very beginning how important the logs are, and why you shouldn’t let other people keep them for you, we would be in a rather different state right now. The next Facebook should never happen. It’s intermediated innovation serving the needs of financiers, not serving the needs of people. Which is not say that social networking shouldn’t happen, it shouldn’t happen with a man in the middle attack built into it.

"

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Eben Moglen, 2012 Freedom to Connect conference keynote address.

Go read the whole thing. Many thanks to Andy for pointing me to it.

(via whitneymcn)

This is well worth reading in its entirety.

(via anti-teachings)

Source: whitneymcn
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