pre–internet

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
by Gretchen McCulloch
Published 22 Jul 2019

But that number rose to 50 percent by 2012, and that stat has continued to grow a percentage point or two per year. Pew also found that a third of seniors were using social media in 2017, a rise from just one in ten in 2010. While not all Pre Internet People are over sixty-five, and not all those over sixty-five are pre-internet (a sixty-five-year-old in 2015 was a spry thirty in 1980, and could well have been an early adopter), the oldest demographic offers the clearest example of delayed rates of internet and social media adoption. Curiously, Pre Internet People share some commonalities with Post Internet People, who came online around the same time. They’ve both never really known an internet without Facebook and YouTube and wifi and touchscreens, and they’re both disproportionately likely to be using their family members’ cast-off electronics.

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Half of this wave are those who are too young to remember life before the internet and started going online as they learned how to read and type: these are Post Internet People. The second half is older, consisting of people who thought they could just ignore this whole internet thing but eventually, belatedly, decided to join: we’ll call them the Pre Internet People. (Those who are still offline might be termed Non Internet People.) The Old Internet, Semi Internet, and Pre Internet cohorts are artifacts of how the internet was introduced. Mixed-age technophiles got online much earlier, the somewhat skeptical majority waited until it was the normal thing to do, and the most technophobic delayed entry as long as they could.

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For people who came online in the late 2000s and into the 2010s, social media was already ubiquitous. These users were typically either retired from work or too young to use email for professional reasons, so they often skipped directly to social media and chat apps instead. PRE INTERNET PEOPLE The members of our oldest cohort are on the internet (sporadically), but they’re not of it. Pre Internet People were around for the previous waves, when the internet came into existence and became mainstream, but at the time they figured they could get by just fine without it. In the 2010s, many of them gradually found their way online, as so much information and socialization had moved there.

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection
by Michael Harris
Published 6 Aug 2014

I wanted release from the migraine-scale pressure of constant communication, the ping-ping-ping of perma-messaging, the dominance of communication over experience. Somehow I’d left behind my old quiet life. And now I wanted it back. • • • • • If you were born before 1985, then you know what life is like both with the Internet and without. You are making the pilgrimage from Before to After. (Any younger and you haven’t lived as an adult in a pre-Internet landscape.) Those of us in this straddle generation, with one foot in the digital pond and the other on the shore, are experiencing a strange suffering as we acclimatize. We are the digital immigrants, and like all immigrants, we don’t always find the new world welcoming. The term itself—“digital immigrant”—isn’t a perfect one: It’s often assumed that the immigrant is somehow upgrading his or her citizenship or fleeing persecution.

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• • • • • It’s becoming more and more obvious. I live on the edge of a Matrix-style sleep, as do we all. On one side: a bright future where we are always connected to our friends and lovers, never without an aid for reminiscence or a reminder of our social connections. On the other side: the twilight of our pre-Internet youths. And wasn’t there something . . . ? Some quality . . . ? I began this chapter lamenting little Benjamin’s confusion over the difference between a touch-sensitive iPad screen and a hard copy of Vanity Fair. But now I have a confession to make. I’m not much better off. This is not a youth-only phenomenon.

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Nevertheless, MOOCs and the attendant dematerialization of the education process are creating a certain crisis of authenticity. A large Pew Research Center survey found that most people believe we’ll see a mass adoption of “distance learning” by 2020, and many are wondering whether that will brush aside the sun-dappled campuses, shared coffees, and lawn lolling that pre-Internet students considered so essential to their twenty-something lives. There are also more concrete points to consider. Graduation rates, for starters: Another MOOC godfather at Stanford, Sebastian Thrun (of Udacity), was tantalized for a while by the possibility of bringing Ivy League education to the world’s unfortunates, but he later announced in Fast Company magazine that less than 10 percent of his MOOC students were actually completing courses.

100 Things We've Lost to the Internet
by Pamela Paul
Published 14 Oct 2021

Some of these lost things were immediately evident: the photo albums we once painstakingly assembled using those sticky corners that inevitably stuck on crooked; the CD collection alphabetized by genre that represented who we were at our core and what we hoped others would see in us; the way we used to rush to the mailbox in the hopes of a surprise postcard from a friend abroad. Other things we sensed more slowly, well into the aftermath of their disappearance: things that were gone or as good as gone, so far had they drifted in character from their pre-Internet selves. Like the college reunion that no longer abounds in startling revelations about who ran off with the babysitter or who has aged well and who has let it all go. Or the kind of customer service you could get only in the Bloomingdale’s shoe department, where you and the saleswoman would hunt down the right dress pump for Saturday night as if united in a shared mission.

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We’ve witnessed a rectangular screen reduce an exuberant class full of children to a grid of glassy-eyed six-year-olds only half-present for their exhausted, quarantined teacher, who no longer bounds into the room full of energy for circle time, smelling faintly of gardenias or chocolate chip cookies. We have seen the magnificent sight of a rocky New Zealand shore reduced to a desktop background. Spend a few hours surfing around online and the world can look petty, repetitive, and flat. Online (where else?) people will lament the passing of certain pre-Internet passions. One ongoing meme involves citing things that no longer exist and would stump a twenty-year-old. These lists are themselves liked and favorited repeatedly, nostalgically, almost ecstatically: Dialing a rotary phone! DVD extras. CD-ROMs. In the spring of 2019, a popular discussion on Reddit asked, “What’s something the Internet killed that you miss?”

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That I’m-the-only-one feeling that so many of us have felt at one point or another can be dissipated in an instant by wandering into the right subthread or by entering the beginning of a question into Google only to see the rest of it filled in like a psychic describing your current predicament with uncanny accuracy. Other people are there too, tapping in their embarrassing questions and darkest fears—others just like you. As for the losses, to many of our pre-Internet ways we can say farewell and good riddance! Does anyone miss having to drive to three different hardware stores to find the right battery for a flashlight? Or arguing with a spouse over the name of the movie Joe Pantoliano played that guy in last summer? Hunting through the yellow pages for the GE customer service number only to find that it’s already been changed?

Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web
by Cole Stryker
Published 14 Jun 2011

In a 2010 interview with NPR, Dawkins said, “Well, I was pretty computer-literate for the time, but neither I nor anybody else, I think, had any very clear idea of what this enormous flowering that would become the Internet. It’s become the perfect ecology for memes. I mean, the Internet is now one, great, memetic ecosystem.” Pre-Internet Memes Is Yosemite Bear, the burly eccentric who achieved cultural ubiquity with his famous expression of awe at the sight of a “double rainbow,” really all that different from Toby Radloff, the “genuine nerd” who became something of a pre-Internet microcelebrity when he starred in a series of MTV promotional shorts in the ’80s? Radloff was a coworker of comics legend Harvey Pekar, who featured Radloff in his American Splendor comics.

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Many of today’s hip hop producers sample classic hip hop loops, which are themselves made up of bits of soul and jazz from the ’60s and ’70s. And the beats are only part of this cultural milieu. B-boy dancing, MCing (rapping), and graffiti are layered over the music in a rich sensory experience that vividly demonstrates the way all art evolves memetically. The graffiti that evolved from hip hop culture is a prominent pre-Internet visual meme. Like many memes, graffiti is a means of showing off creativity or spreading a message. Sometimes graffiti artists just want to mark their territory. We’ve all probably seen “X was here” scrawled on a bathroom stall at some point. Where did that come from? Why is it observed all over the world?

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Tricking a celebrity into acknowledging the existence of Anonymous was funny, but doing it under the pretense of a fake army of over nine thousand organized pedophiles was considered an epic win for the trolls. I often wonder if anyone told poor Oprah afterwards that she’d been had. Troll Heritage Perhaps the finest example of a pre-Internet troll is the late comedian and entertainer Andy Kaufman, who made a career out of subversive multilayered publicity stunts so convincing that some fans still doubt the authenticity of his 1984 death from kidney failure. Kaufman would concoct elaborate hoaxes and practical jokes. He once appeared on The Dating Game as a sweating, stuttering foreign man whose awkward delivery confounded the other participants.

Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City
by Brad Feld
Published 8 Oct 2012

INDEX A Accelerators, power of compared to incubators TechStars expansion to New York spread to Boston and Seattle university Activities and events Boulder Beta Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup Boulder Open Coffee Club Boulder Startup Week CU New Venture Challenge Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado Ignite Boulder office hours Startup Weekend Young Entrepreneurs Organization (YEO) Birthing of Giants event Addoms, Ben After-party, importance of Artificial geographic boundaries, creating Aulet, Bill Avitek Awieda, Jesse B Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 Benioff, Marc Berberian, Paul Bernthal, Brad Bhargava, Rajat Biotech startup community (Boulder) Bitter Bar Bizspark (Microsoft) BlueMountainArts.com Boston startup community Boulder Angels Boulder Beta Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup Boulder Open Angel Forum Boulder Open Coffee Club Boulder Jobs List Boulder startup community Boulder as laboratory history of Boulder beginning of next wave (2003–2011) collapse of Internet bubble (2001–2002) pre-Internet (1970–1994) pre-Internet bubble (1995–2000) Boulder Startup Week Boulder Thesis, xii, xvii Brown, David Business incubators C Calacanis, Jason Capital, complaining about Carman, Carl Caruthers, Marv Case, Scott Cohen, David Coleman, Bill Colorado Internet Keiretsu Colorado School of Mines Field Session program Colorado Springs startup community Community, power of after-party, importance of embracing weirdness give and take honesty mentors openness to ideas walking Creative class CU New Venture Challenge Cuccaro, Nick Currie, Andrew D Deming Center for Entrepreneurship Diamond, Howard DiBanca, Suzanne E Email Publishing Entrepreneurial density Entrepreneurs and government, contrasts between action vs. policy bottom up vs. top down impact vs. control micro vs. macro self-aware vs. not self-aware leadership role of as participants in startup community Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado Entrepreneurs Unplugged Enwall, Tim Essler, Pete Events.

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CONTENTS Foreword Preface Acknowledgments Chapter One: Introduction The Example of Boulder How this Book Works Chapter Two: The Boulder Startup Community Boulder as a Laboratory Before the Internet (1970–1994) Pre-Internet Bubble (1995–2000) The Collapse of the Internet Bubble (2001–2002) The Beginning of the Next Wave (2003–2011) An Outsider’s View of Boulder Chapter Three: Principles of a Vibrant Startup Community Historical Frameworks The Boulder Thesis Led by Entrepreneurs Long-Term Commitment Foster a Philosophy of Inclusiveness Engage the Entire Entrepreneurial Stack Chapter Four: Participants in a Startup Community Entrepreneurs Government Universities Investors Mentors Service Providers Large Companies The Importance of Both Leaders and Feeders Chapter Five: Attributes of Leadership in a Startup Community Be Inclusive Play a Non-Zero-Sum Game Be Mentorship Driven Have Porous Boundaries Give People Assignments Experiment and Fail Fast Chapter Six: Classical Problems The Patriarch Problem Complaining About Capital Being Too Reliant on Government Making Short-Term Commitments Having a Bias Against Newcomers Attempt by a Feeder to Control the Community Creating Artificial Geographic Boundaries Playing a Zero-Sum Game Having a Culture of Risk Aversion Avoiding People Because of Past Failures Chapter Seven: Activities and Events Young Entrepreneurs Organization Office Hours Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup Boulder Open Coffee Club Startup Weekend Ignite Boulder Boulder Beta Boulder Startupdigest Cu New Venture Challenge Boulder Startup Week Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado Chapter Eight: The Power of Accelerators The Spread of Techstars to Boston and Seattle Techstars Expands to New York Accelerators are Different than Incubators University Accelerators Chapter Nine: University Involvement Silicon Flatirons Some Components of CU Boulder Challenges to Entrepreneurship Programs at Universities Why they Don’t Work in Isolation The Real Value—Fresh Blood into the System The Power of Alumni Chapter Ten: Contrasts between Entrepreneurs and Government Self-Aware Versus Not Self-Aware Bottom Up Versus Top Down Micro Versus Macro Action Versus Policy Impact Versus Control Chapter Eleven: The Power of the Community Give Before You Get Everyone is a Mentor Embrace Weirdness Be Open to Any Idea Be Honest Go for a Walk The Importance of the After-Party Chapter Twelve: Broadening a Successful Startup Community Parallel Universes Integration With the Rest of Colorado Lack of Diversity Space Chapter Thirteen: Myths about Startup Communities We Need to Be Like Silicon Valley We Need More Local Venture Capital Angel Investors Must Be Organized Chapter Fourteen: Getting Started Getting Startup Iceland Started Big Omaha Startup America Partnership Do or Do Not, There is No Try About the Author Index Excerpt from Startup Life Cover illustrations: Silhoueted figure: © Leontura/istockphoto; Silhoueted women and man: © edge69/istockphoto; City Background: C.

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Merc Mercure, the founder of Ball Aerospace, and Bill Coleman, who ran the Syntex facility in Boulder, together formed Colorado Venture Management, the city’s first seed fund. Finally, Jim Roser, a renowned East Coast investment banker, moved to Boulder in the 1970s and provided a critical link to capital for a number of local companies. Together, these five individuals pioneered the venture capital industry in Boulder. Kyle Lefkoff, Boulder Ventures PRE-INTERNET BUBBLE (1995–2000) When I first arrived in Boulder, I had no work expectations. At the time I was investing my own money, which I made from the sale of my first company, in startups around the country, and I was spending my time in Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle. Because I was already crisscrossing the country, I figured that having a home base in the middle of the country would make my life easier.

Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age
by Cory Doctorow , Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman
Published 18 Nov 2014

The goal of this book is to provide a first-of-its-kind look at the pitfalls and opportunities for earning a creative living in the age of the Internet. I want to equip you with the critical skills required to have a non-zero chance of making a living as an artist today, in the world as it is. Not in the world as it was in the pre-Internet era, and not in any of the tomorrows we’ve been promised. What I do on the Internet (aka: Why listen to me?) Why should you listen to what I have to say about the Internet? Well, I may not be the world’s geekiest artist (I hold out novelist Charles Stross or cartoonist Randall Munroe for this honor), but I am a pretty serious geek.

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It’s the reason they take such a big slice of the price of our media, relative to the creator’s share—they have to invest in a lot of failures to get one “success.” Looking at it that way, we can enumerate a few people for whom free copying has worked, and a lot of people for whom it hasn’t worked. And we can name a few people for whom controlling copies—in the pre-Internet era—worked, and lots for whom it failed. Fame isn’t money. You can’t pay for a plane ticket with fame. You can’t pay for your kids’ braces with fame. You can’t pay for a copy of this book with fame. (Unless you’re famous as a reviewer, in which case you can.) But if you’re in the arts, you’ll never get money without some kind of fame.

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Creators have never enjoyed a wider, more diverse, less united, and more pliable set of intermediaries than we have today. From YouTube to Twitter, Facebook to WordPress, Wikia to Tumblr and many, many (many, many, many, many) others, there have never been more ways for works and audiences to come together. This is bad news if you’re a success from the pre-Internet era, with a business model married tightly to the intermediaries who serve your markets. You might know to the penny what it will cost you to put a movie into theatrical distribution, or get a book into the endcaps in every chain store in the country. You’re accustomed to being able to run a cost-benefit analysis: “A certain number of people will go to the movies every weekend.

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future
by John Brockman
Published 18 Jan 2011

We know what’s happening to those who were born after the advent of the Internet; for those, like me, who started out with typewriters, books, slowness, reality measured by geographical distance and local clocks, the emerging world is very different indeed from the world we knew. I am of that generation for which adapting to computers was welcome and easy but for which the pre-Internet age remains real. I can relate to those who call the radio “the wireless,” and I admire people in their seventies and eighties who communicate by e-mail, because they come from further away still. Perhaps the way forward would be to emphasize the teaching of history in schools, to develop curricula on the history of technology, to remind today’s children that their technology, absolutely embracing as it feels, is relative and does not represent the totality of the universe.

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It can devour time in all sorts of frivolous ways, from chat rooms to video games. And what better way to interrupt one’s thought processes than by an intermittent stream of incoming e-mail messages? Moreover, the Internet has made interpersonal communication much more circumscribed than in the pre-Internet era. What you write today may come back to haunt you tomorrow. The brouhaha in late 2009 following the revelations of the climate scientists’ e-mails is an excellent case in point. So while the Internet provides a means for rapidly communicating with colleagues globally, the sophisticated user will rarely reveal true thoughts and feelings in such messages.

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Edge, A to Z (Pars Pro Toto) Hans Ulrich Obrist Curator, Serpentine Gallery, London; editor, A Brief History of Curating; Formulas for Now A is for And The Internet made me think more BOTH/AND instead of EITHER/OR or NEITHER/NOR. B is for Beginnings In terms of my curatorial thinking, my eureka moments occurred pre-Internet, when I met visionary Swiss artists Fischli/Weiss (Peter Fischli and David Weiss) in 1985. These conversations freed me up—freed my thoughts as to what curating could be and how curating can produce reality. The arrival of the Internet was a trigger for me to think more in the form of Oulipian lists—practical-poetical, evolutive, and often nonlinear lists.

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom
by Rebecca MacKinnon
Published 31 Jan 2012

As Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig explained more than a decade ago in his seminal book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, software code and technical standards are for all practical purposes a new form of law, because just like laws, they shape what people can and cannot do. The implications are massive. In the pre-Internet era, government—which in democracies at least is expected to reflect “consent of the governed” and to be held accountable to the public interest—had the primary responsibility for developing legal codes governing what people did in the physical world, backed up by the authority and force necessary to enforce meaningful levels of compliance.

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Despite government efforts to control the news, people were simply too angry—about abuse of power by petty local officials, as well as about the economic circumstances that compel young women to make a living in such sleazy establishments. Realizing that a conviction could spark riots, the authorities eventually dropped the murder charges against her. She was convicted on a lesser charge instead and set free. In the pre-Internet age, such a person would have disappeared into the prison system or into a mental health ward, unbeknownst to anybody other than a few close friends and relations in Hubei. The Internet enables ordinary Chinese people to speak truth to power and pursue justice in unprecedented ways. At the same time, Chinese Internet users have a manipulated and distorted view of their own country as well as of the broader world.

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It can mean freedom for the Internet: noninterference in the Internet’s networks and platforms by governments or other entities. It can mean freedom within the Internet: individuals speaking and interacting in this virtual space have the same right to virtual free expression and assembly as they have to the physical pre-Internet equivalents. It can mean freedom to connect to the Internet: any attempt to prevent citizens from accessing it is a violation of their right to free expression and assembly. Finally, “Internet freedom” can also mean freedom of the Internet: free and open architecture and governance, which means that the people and organizations who use computer code to determine its technical standards, as well as those who use legal code to regulate what can and cannot be done within and through the Internet, all share the common goal of keeping the Internet open, free, and globally interconnected so that all netizens are free not only to use it, but also to participate in shaping it themselves.

Bit Rot
by Douglas Coupland
Published 4 Oct 2016

Having said this, there’s a part of me that misses being able to bullshit people at dinner parties without having an iPad come out before dessert to sink an urban legend or debunk a stretched truth. I wonder if nostalgia for the twentieth-century brain is a waste of time. While I may sometimes miss my pre-Internet brain, I certainly don’t want it back. Everyone’s quick to dump on new technologies, but how quickly we forget a two-hour trek to the local library in the 1990s to find something as mundane as a single tradesman’s phone number in the Yellow Pages for a city twenty miles away. How cavalier we all are when we say, “Let me just quickly Google that.”

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So then what gets lost and what gets kept? Wheat. Chaff. All of that. It’s said that Goethe was the last human being who knew everything about the world that was possible to learn at that time. In this sense Goethe was like a proto-Internet, but now he lives on in a 2.0 version called the cloud. We’re all Goethe now. I may miss my pre-Internet brain, but I’m rapidly forgetting it too. Futurosity I’ve spent much of my life waiting for the future to happen, yet it never really felt like we were there. And then, in this past year, it’s almost instantly become impossible to deny that we are now all, magically and collectively, living in that far-off place we once called the future.

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The answer would be the exact same answer that would have been given ten years ago, two thousand years ago or one thousand years in the future. We’re still around, so the answer is no, but this still doesn’t change the fact that we’re stuck living inside the future, where we’re stuck worrying about this question for all of our waking hours. I suspect that abandoning one’s pre-Internet brain is the only intelligent adaptive strategy necessary for mental health in the world of a perpetual future. How much futurosity can our brains accept before they explode or implode? I wonder if maybe the sensation of futurosity is a mental tick applicable only to people born before a certain window in time closed, a state of mind specific to those who remember a world that once possessed a present tense.

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right
by Angela Nagle
Published 6 Jun 2017

They then attacked a series of feminist gamers and games critics, who waded in, including Brianna Wu, Felicia Day and Jennifer Allaway. In each case there are countless conflicting accounts about the nature of threats and attacks, but even taking the uncontroversial ones alone, it is fair to say they did receive a level of abuse that in the pre-Internet days were reserved for few other than child murderers. This got so out of hand that even the founder of 4chan and champion of the anonymous Internet, moot, banned gamergate talk from 4chan, eventually causing him to leave the site, and the gamergaters moved to the more lawless 8chan. Quinn found and recorded some of the conversations that took place on a 4chan IRC called ‘burgersandfries’, in which users conspired to destroy her career using the most extreme misogynist language and motivations.

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This wave of more overtly anti-feminist men’s politics included the National Coalition of Free Men, who took influence from books like Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power and Neil Lyndon’s No More Sex War: The Failures of Feminism. They rejected the idea of male privilege and focussed on discrimination against fathers and violence against men. But even the most militantly anti-feminist forms of pre-Internet men’s rights activism now seem supremely reasonable and mild compared with the anti-feminism that emerged online in the 2010s. A more openly hateful culture was unleashed under the conditions of anonymity and it took on a more right-wing character, living up to the most negative feminist caricatures of men’s rights activism – rage-filled, hateful and chauvinistic.

The Last Girlfriend on Earth: And Other Love Stories
by Simon Rich
Published 22 Jan 2013

Norman Bergman Copilot, Alpha Space Orb Archaeological Excavation Report: Ludlow Lounge Introduction The following report summarizes our findings at the archaeological site known as Ludlow Lounge. Most of our records of Earth 1 were lost in the Great Google Crash of 4081. But all evidence suggests that this structure once served as a ritualistic social hub for primitive, pre-Internet man. Findings Not much is known about pre-Internet courtship rituals. But presumably, if a twentieth-century male was in need of sexual release, he had no choice but to physically approach a female and, without any kind of warning, begin speaking to her. Needless to say, this must have been a highly upsetting experience for everyone involved.

Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent
by Douglas Coupland
Published 29 Sep 2014

This book also uses what I learned about Alca-Loo as a stepping stone into larger meditation … about what data and speed and optical wiring are doing to us as a species–about what the Internet is doing to us as it relentlessly colonizes the planet and our brains, about how a totally under-the-radar company has transformed our interior lives, and how far the process will go before people step back and say, “You know, I really don’t remember my pre-Internet brain at all.” I could never have written this book had Alain de Botton not spent a week at Heathrow Airport and then used his experiences there as a way of musing on travel and the human soul in his book A Week at the Airport. His decision to expand his project by asking other writers to investigate other organizations made for a fascinating year.

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I’m jet-lagged and I’m concerned because the date on the shuttle bus’s dashboard clock reminded me that it’s already February. Time is moving too quickly these days—and yet, at the same time, it’s moving too slowly. And it’s not just that I’m growing older. Quite simply, my brain no longer feels the way it used to; my sense of time is distinctly different from what it once was, and I miss my pre-Internet brain. The Internet has burrowed inside my head and laid eggs, and it feels like they’re all hatching. Welcome to the early twenty-first century, a world where the future somehow feels like … homework. Of course, I know that my perception of time’s passage is not changing because of Internet eggs hatching inside my brain.

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
by Clive Thompson
Published 11 Sep 2013

As the historian David Henkin notes in The Postal Age, the per capita volume of letters in the United States in 1860 was only 5.15 per year. “That was a huge change at the time—it was important,” Henkin tells me. “But today it’s the exceptional person who doesn’t write five messages a day. I think a hundred years from now scholars will be swimming in a bewildering excess of life writing.” As an example of the pre-Internet age, consider my mother. She’s seventy-seven years old and extremely well read—she received a terrific education in the Canadian high school system and voraciously reads novels and magazines. But she doesn’t use the Internet to express herself; she doesn’t write e-mail, comment on discussion threads or Facebook, post status updates, or answer questions online.

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There is a constant flood of live citizen news; during the Arab Spring, when journalists were banned from many of the countries in which protests were taking place, government crackdowns were documented primarily by the protesters themselves. And there are conversational forms emerging, like the response video, a type of commentary that has essentially no analogue from the pre-Internet video universe: People commenting on a video by recording their own response, which itself gets responded to, and on and on. What’s striking about these videos is how weird many of them are aesthetically. The riotous amateur quality of much online video is reminiscent of the hallucinogenic short films that were made in the late nineteenth century, when film was brand-new and no one knew how to use it.

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This is what the theory of multiples would predict, of course: If you’re fascinated by subject X, no matter how obscure and idiosyncratic, a thousand people are out there with the same fascination. But for most of history, people couldn’t engage in mass collaboration. It was too expensive. To organize a widespread group around a task in the pre-Internet period, you needed a central office, staff devoted to coordinating efforts, expensive forms of long-distance communication (telegraphs, phone lines, trains), somebody to buy pencils and paper clips and to manage inventory. These are known as transaction costs, and they’re huge. But there was no way around them.

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
by Daniel J. Levitin
Published 18 Aug 2014

The people who make up the crowd in crowdsourcing are typically amateurs and enthusiastic hobbyists, although this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. Crowdsourcing is perhaps most visible as a form of consumer ratings via Yelp, Zagat, and product ratings on sites such as Amazon.com. In the old, pre-Internet days, a class of workers existed who were expert reviewers and they would share their impressions of products and services in newspaper articles or magazines such as Consumer Reports. Now, with TripAdvisor, Yelp, Angie’s List, and others of their ilk, ordinary people are empowered to write reviews about their own experiences.

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Now, with TripAdvisor, Yelp, Angie’s List, and others of their ilk, ordinary people are empowered to write reviews about their own experiences. This cuts both ways. In the best cases, we are able to learn from the experiences of hundreds of people about whether this motel is clean and quiet, or that restaurant is greasy and has small portions. On the other hand, there were advantages to the old system. The pre-Internet reviewers were professionals—they performed reviews for a living—and so they had a wealth of experience to draw on. If you were reading a restaurant review, you’d be reading it from someone who had eaten in a lot of restaurants, not someone who has little to compare it to. Reviewers of automobiles and hi-fi equipment had some expertise in the topic and could put a product through its paces, testing or paying attention to things that few of us would think of, yet might be important—such as the functioning of antilock brakes on wet pavement.

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It is not just because they’re reading less literary fiction, it’s because they’re spending more time alone under the illusion that they’re being social. Online dating is organized differently from conventional dating in four key ways—access, communication, matching, and asynchrony. Online dating gives us access to a much larger and broader set of potential mates than we would have encountered in our pre-Internet lives. The field of eligibles used to be limited to people we knew, worked with, worshipped with, went to school with, or lived near. Many dating sites boast millions of users, dramatically increasing the size of the pool. In fact, the roughly two billion people who are connected to the Internet are potentially accessible.

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets
by John McMillan
Published 1 Jan 2002

In other words, certain kinds of transaction costs have been lowered by the internet: the cost of acquiring information, the time, effort, and money needed to learn what is available where and at what price. The transaction costs of buying out-of-print books in pre-internet days were high. Now all you have to do is point and click.4 The internet has made possible global markets for all kinds of goods that previously had only local markets. In pre-internet days, if you collected eighteenth-century snuffboxes, to assuage your obsession you might have driven from small town to small town to rummage through dusty antique shops and flea markets. Only rarely would you have stumbled upon the object of your dreams.

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Among the stranger items that have been listed are a bucketful of dirt from Texas, two hundred thousand pounds of assorted knit fabrics, a parking space for one week near downtown San Francisco, sand from Baywatch, and a tee-shirt saying “I sold my soul on eBay.” One of the secrets of eBay’s success was in recognizing that the internet, by making it easy for buyers and sellers to get together, created new possibilities for trading knickknacks of all kinds. The other secret of its success was in building a user-friendly and flexible auction mechanism. Pre-internet auctions had the disadvantage that they required the potential buyers to assemble in one place. (Bids were sometimes made by telephone or fax, but this was clumsy.) Bidders in an eBay auction get together only in cyberspace. eBay lowered the costs of transacting enough that people anywhere wanting to trade low-value items are able to deal directly with each other.

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another
by Matt Taibbi
Published 7 Oct 2019

The New York Times deciding to cover the O.J. freak show full-time broke the seal on the open commercialization of dumb news that among other things led to a future where Donald Trump could be a viable presidential candidate. In the old days, the news was a mix of this toothless trivia and cheery dispatches from the front lines of Pax Americana. The whole fam could sit and watch it without getting upset (by necessity: an important principle in pre-Internet broadcasting is that nothing on the air, including the news, could be as intense or as creative as the commercials). The news once designed to be consumed by the whole house, by loving Mom, by your crazy right-wing uncle, by your earnest college-student cousin who just came home wearing a Che T-shirt.

…

It’s a real story, but it’s exaggerated, often wildly, and comes wrapped in proposals for authoritarian solutions. The only thing preventing moral panic from becoming the dominant model of commercial press in the past was that we in the media had other ways of making money. As Jim Moroney of the Dallas Morning News explained to me, newspapers in the pre-Internet days were cash machines. They had their own networks of trucks and distribution points, and if you wanted to find a worker for hire or sell a car, the local paper was the only game in town. “These were scarcity businesses,” is how he put it. It was the same with local radio and TV stations, limited in number because each needed FCC licenses.

…

The part of Manufacturing Consent on ownership and control, that’s basically his work, the introductory part. Then we kind of shared much of the rest. His style is different from mine. We worked together very well, but in different ways. Actually we never even met! We met probably two or three times overall. That was pre-Internet, so it was all on paper. Taibbi: It was all done by correspondence? Chomsky: Correspondence. Taibbi: Wow. Like typewritten? Handwritten? Chomsky: (smiling) Oh, typewritten! Taibbi: Wow. Chomsky: If you remember what it was like then—probably you don’t. Taibbi: My generation is probably the last that does.

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
by Kyle Chayka
Published 15 Jan 2024

What’s more, the Echo Look also offered instant purchases of clothing that matched its ideal dress code, sold by Amazon, of course, which profited from its vision of algorithmic averageness. This is a bottom-up model of cultural preferences at odds with both the personal definition of taste and the pre-Internet system of tastemakers, individuals who handpicked what was cool and imposed it on everyone else. The hierarchy is best depicted in a scene—and now meme—from the 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada. Meryl Streep plays a facsimile of the Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour, while Anne Hathaway is her naive assistant who is just learning the ropes of fashion media.

…

They were further replicating the image, ensuring its dominance as a generic symbol of Iceland. It reminded me of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, in which the college-professor protagonist travels into the countryside with his colleague Murray to see “The Most Photographed Barn in America.” Nothing makes the barn particularly remarkable except its notoriety—a fictional pre-Internet meme. Observing the crowd of photographers around the barn, Murray says, “We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura.” “No one sees the barn,” he concludes. “They are taking pictures of taking pictures.” In Filterworld, it becomes hard to separate the nature of something, or its reality, from its popularity in terms of attention.

…

While the role might not be as high-profile these days (due in part to the intrusion of algorithms), DJs also help their listeners in that vital process of discovering new culture. As I’ve written this book, independent radio DJs have stuck out in my mind as an ideal form of non-algorithmic cultural distribution. Even pre-Internet, radio stations beamed out a round-the-clock stream of music and information, all selected by hand. When accessed by actual radio waves, they are also specific to their geographic area (the waves can’t travel forever) and exist in real time, responding to a context that’s shared with the listener—whether that’s the weather, time of day, or a regional dialect.

Dilbert 2.0: The Boom Years
by Scott Adams
Published 18 Jul 2012

I didn’t care what publication printed them. I just wanted to get paid for cartooning, and to feel as if I was doing something that had upside potential, unlike my job. But how do you become a cartoonist? I had no idea. So I started my affirmations again, this time focusing on becoming a cartoonist. In pre-Internet days, figuring out how to do something out of the ordinary was a challenge. In a strange twist of fate, I came home from work one day, and found myself in the right place at the right time. I started flipping through the channels on TV and noticed the tail end of a show about cartooning. As the closing credits rolled by, I grabbed a pen and paper, and wrote down the name of the host: Jack Cassady.

Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China's ByteDance
by Matthew Brennan
Published 9 Oct 2020

Yiming laid out a framework 80 detailing the evolution of methods by which information was distributed in the internet age. The earliest method being “portal websites.” Above: methods of internet empowered informational distribution. 81 Human curation - portal websites, Yahoo! AOL Portal websites are similar to pre-internet newspapers in that they are traditionally large centralized collections of content updated and organized by editorial staff. A key characteristic of portal sites is that human editors decide which content to display and give prominence to. This centralized human curation has its roots back in the internet’s earliest days when it was possible to list all the major internet sites in a single manually curated directory.

…

The portal site model remained remarkably resilient, and using human editors to select and curate the order of content was the way most of Toutiao’s predecessors preferred to operate. Curation by human editors is arguably not a true internet mode of content distribution but merely a continuation of the pre-internet forms of delivery such as newspapers or TV in that it shares the characteristics of being a one way broadcast with limited interaction or personalization. Search engines – high intent By the mid-1990’s it had become abundantly clear that the web was now too large to index manually. The internet represented an explosion of information; suddenly, anyone could set up their own blog site and start publishing online.

Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style
by Benjamin Dreyer
Published 15 Jan 2019

A novel set in the early twentieth century might well feature not a lightbulb, as we’d now style that word, but a light bulb or a light-bulb, and you may or may not want to refer to a telephone as a ’phone, an omnibus as a ’bus, or influenza as the ’flu. Sometimes you just can’t win. Long ago, in the pre-Internet era, when it wasn’t quite so easy to know everything in a split second, I copyedited a novel set in the early 1960s that referred in passing to a Burger King. “AU,” I wrote in the margin, “PLS. CONFIRM THE EXISTENCE OF BURGER KINGS IN THE 1960S.” The author ultimately chose to change the Burger King to some sort of Grilled Sandwich Shack of his own devise, acknowledging to me that though he’d carefully researched the history of the food chain and was accurate in his citation, every single person who’d read the manuscript before I did had asked him the same question, and it wasn’t, he decided, worth the reader hiccup.*12 THE BASICS OF GOOD STORYTELLING Many writers rely more heavily on pronouns than I’d suggest is useful.

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.*21 Mostly I just want you to spell/style these correctly: BREYERS There’s no apostrophe in the name of this ice cream brand. Not to be confused with Dreyer’s,*22 which does have an apostrophe. BUBBLE WRAP A brand of what one might otherwise choose to call bubble pack. CAP’N CRUNCH Not “Captain.” Nostalgia alert: This one always particularly reminds me of how in the pre-Internet era I used to jot down all the householdy brand names mentioned in whatever manuscript I was working on, then take a trip to the supermarket, notepad in hand, to walk the aisles, peer at packaging, and verify spellings. So as not to seem completely mad, I would also, in between peering and verifying, do my shopping.

Happy-Go-Lucky
by David Sedaris
Published 30 May 2022

If you attend a progressive private school and have supportive parents who’ve got lots of artistic friends, maybe you can go straight from your realization to acceptance. Olivier’s family seemed pretty cool. His grandparents had no problem with me and Hugh, or with the lesbian couple who would later move in down the road and were so butch that at first we all took them to be men. But twelve is young, especially in those pre-internet days, and more so when you lived, as Olivier did, in a town of only thirteen thousand. In our tiny village the population was closer to fifty, and most everyone was either retired or well into adulthood. There was no one for the kids to hang out with except one another and the inarticulate man-child—me—who lived just across the road.

…

He’s been sleeping with his sister-in-law. She’s a spendthrift and a racist, he’s a control freak, etc. No couple argued over which gender their child should be allowed to identify as; no one’s husband or wife got sucked into QAnon or joined a paramilitary group. Sure, there were conspiracy theories, but in those pre-internet days it was harder to submerge yourself in them. A spouse might have been addicted to Valium but not to video games, or online gambling. I don’t know that one can technically be addicted to pornography, but that’s bound to put a strain on marriages, especially now, when it’s at your fingertips, practically daring you not to look at it.

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us
by Tim Sullivan
Published 6 Jun 2016

The platform manager makes customer feedback possible, and in theory, the wisdom of crowds takes care of the rest, solving the asymmetric information problem that George Akerlof identified as the enemy of market function back in 1970. This has led to all sorts of match-making platforms for goods or services where it was hard to find a reliable provider in the pre–internet era. If Akerlof had wanted to renovate his house in the ’70s, for instance, he would have had to find a Berkeley-area contractor who had the skills for the job, had the time to take it on, was reliable, would quote a fair price, and wouldn’t try to jack up the price once he’d knocked down a few walls.

…

Plus, there were intangibles, things the customer would have a hard time writing a contract on or enforcing, like whether the contractor would track mud through the house or smoke near an open window. As a friend of ours says, if you have to refer back to the contract, something has probably already gone terribly wrong. In this pre–internet era, you’d likely ask your friends and family for suggestions, but that’d usually generate a pretty narrow set of options. The Yellow Pages weren’t much help, since they just listed available firms. An ad might indicate a successful business, one that generated sufficient revenues to pay for it, but that was a pretty weak signal.

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future
by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe
Published 6 Dec 2016

Over the next several days it failed to inform the public about radiation levels, in part because there were few people capable of measuring them in the first place. But like TEPCO’s failure to prepare for an earthquake that scientists considered a matter of when, not if, the government was struggling with a crisis of its own way of thinking. Like most institutions that evolved in a pre-Internet era, the Japanese Nuclear Safety Commission was built for a command-and-control management style. Information from the front lines, like from the Fukushima plant, had to work its way up through many tiers of management. Decisions would then follow the same route back down. The approach by Fukushima, and the disastrous results that stemmed from it, give us a case study in two divergent views of decision making.

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These little things are part of the difference between the corporate world and your new job, which is more that of a civil servant.” The only thing I would disagree with Nicholas about is that I believe that even in the corporate world, companies are no longer well served by the traditional top-down leadership style of the pre-Internet era. In this chapter we discussed the importance of having a direction—a compass—and the pitfalls of trying to map or plan in a world of complexity and change. It is nearly impossible to have a detailed plan when leading a complex and creative organization like the Media Lab. In fact, in many ways, the word leading probably invokes the wrong image, since we often think of our leaders as having a tremendous amount of control and direct power.

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us
by James Ball
Published 19 Aug 2020

On that level – of having people we know in one easy place to send group messages, chat to each other and organise events – it is better to have one social network like Facebook, with 2 billion users, than to have twenty rival networks with 100 million people apiece on each. Unless such networks had means to inter-operate – and why would they, if they’re rivals? – that could easily be much worse for users. In practice, though, network effects go much further than just social networks, and gather power for whoever controls the networks. A pre-internet idea of a network effect can be found in, for example, railways: add an extra stop to an existing railway line, and it helps existing customers, who now have an additional place they can visit, as well as the ones living by the new stop. ‘A network effect is, as you add nodes, which could be railway stops or customers, you create more value for everybody in the system,’ Wenger says.

…

Accelerating this growth was a surfeit of venture capital money fuelling the rise of dotcoms – encouraging them to pursue huge global scale over revenue, pushing them towards the ad model and helping to make sure the massive returns of the successful companies were concentrated in the hands of people who already had considerable personal wealth, as well as the institutional investors (universities, pension funds and similar) who had already enjoyed significant clout in the pre-internet world. The financial crash served only to fuel this land-grab. Because central banks were determined to boost their economies and avoid a repeat of the huge economic depression of the early 1930s, they cut their interest rates as close as possible to zero – and then put hundreds of billions of their own cheap credit onto the market.

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest
by Zeynep Tufekci
Published 14 May 2017

There is no need to spend six months putting together a single rally when a hashtag could be used to summon protesters into the streets; no need to deal with the complexities of logistics when crowdfunding and online spreadsheets can do just as well. However, the tedious work performed during the pre-internet era served other purposes as well; perhaps most importantly, it acclimatized people to the processes of collective decision making and helped create the resilience all movements need to survive and thrive in the long term—just as acquiring mountaineering skills through earlier climbs helps climbers develop their capacity to survive the crucial moments when something, almost inevitably, goes wrong.

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In fact, as I stood in Gezi Park, tweeting from a phone tied by law to my unique citizenship ID number in Turkey, I knew that the government surely had a list of every protester who showed up at the park with a phone. Despite this fact, once protests broke out on a large scale, the threat of surveillance deterred few people, partly because they felt protected by the scale of the massive protest. Many movements face severe repression, much as they did in the pre-internet era. In Egypt, a few years after the initial uprising, things were not going well for the revolutionaries. Many of my friends there were now in jail or in exile. Although Mubarak was ousted, the military was not. The Muslim Brotherhood had won the election but had not managed to unseat the old guard from the state apparatus, nor manage to win over the whole population—many people were alarmed at their acts in government, too.

…

To understand the role technology plays in human affairs, we must examine its effects at many levels. The first level of effects requires understanding how the entire societal ecology changes in correspondence with the technological infrastructure. An internet society differs in significant ways from a pre-internet society, and this affects all members of that society, whether a person uses the internet or not. A print society functions through a different ecology of social mechanisms than does a society with an internet public sphere.5 Who is visible? Who can connect with whom? How does knowledge or falsehood travel?

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small
by Steve Sammartino
Published 25 Jun 2014

But more than that, dead-end products are not intended to be reinterpreted, mashed up and released back into the market with our input. The time-saving devices of the industrialised world fit very much into this space. Time is saved because someone else did the hard work to prepare something for you. If you think about life pre-internet, it was filled with dead-end products — packaged goods, fridges, cars, washing machines, sneakers, ducted heating, instant coffee, glossy magazines, sitcom television programs — all sit-back-and-receive scenarios. A future of unfinished products The world we live in now is about handing the brand back over to its rightful owners: the audience.

…

That was until the smartphone — the pocket exception — arrived and started our current era of screen culture. While we still have a number of individual technology devices, increasingly they all perform the same tasks. The smartphone, or pocket screen, is quickly becoming the control panel for a connected existence. Digital demarcation The pre-internet media landscape was quite a stable set of output devices and content creations. Each platform had its output, which was clearly defined and suited to its devices and related technology. There was a small overlap, but they largely had their own job to do. Newspapers, magazines, radio, recordings, cinema and television each had their role to play.

The Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015

What Frank and Cook described as our natural “mental shelf-space constraints” means that in an increasingly information-rich economy, “for any given number of sellers trying to get our attention, an increasingly small fraction of each category can hope to succeed.”31 As Dot.Con author John Cassidy notes, this winner-take-all model was already powerful in the pre-Internet tech economy, where “consumers tended to settle on one or two dominant products, such as Microsoft Windows, which generate big profits.” After the 1995 Netscape Moment triggered the dot-com mania, venture capitalists bet that this winner-take-all model would enable the dominance of a single company in each online sector.

…

As the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci warns about this infinitely creepy networked world, big data companies like Facebook and OkCupid “now have new tools and stealth methods to quietly model our personality, our vulnerabilities, identify our networks, and effectively nudge and shape our ideas, desires and dreams.”44 Such nudging and shaping—particularly for dating—isn’t necessarily new, argues the Financial Times’ Christopher Caldwell. But in the pre-Internet past, he notes, this has been done by outside authorities—particularly parents, communities, and religious bodies. “The difference,” Caldwell notes, between OkCupid’s experiment and parent and religious groups, “is that these groups actually loved the young people they were counselling, had a stake in ensuring things did not go wrong, would help as best they could if things did, and were not using the young lovers strictly as a means of making money.”45 We will be observed by every unloving institution of the new digital surveillance state—from Silicon Valley’s big data companies and the government to insurance companies, health-care providers, the police, and ruthlessly Benthamite employers like Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, with its scientifically managed fulfillment centers where the company watches over its nonunionized workforce.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
by Ross Douthat
Published 25 Feb 2020

According to a recent report from Senator Marco Rubio’s office, private domestic investment averaged 8 percent of GDP between 1947 and 1990; in 2019, despite a long recovery and a corporate tax cut intended to get money off the sidelines, the investment-to-GDP ratio was just 4 percent. This suggests that the people with the most experience starting businesses and getting rich look around at the available investment opportunities and see many more start-ups that resemble Theranos and the Fyre Festival than resemble Amazon or Apple—let alone the behemoths of the pre-Internet economy. And the dearth of corporate investment and innovation also means that the steady climb of the stock market has boosted the wealth of a rentier class—basically, already-rich investors getting richer off dividends—rather than reflecting or driving a general increase in prosperity. A 2019 paper by three economists titled “How the Wealth Was Won” found that 54 percent of the growth of US companies’ stock market value reflected “a reallocation of rents to shareholders in a decelerating economy,” while actual economic growth accounted for just 24 percent.

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Recall that Barzun wrote that decadence could be a “very active time” and “peculiarly restless” despite its tendency toward fatigue and repetition. That combination—restlessness and even frenzied activity that ultimately just recycles and repeats—was also predicted by Jean Baudrillard, famous for his pre-Internet emphasis on simulated reality as the default experience of late modernity. The French theorist answered Fukuyama’s “end of history” argument by suggesting that a society facing the closing of its historical frontier would not, in fact, suffer the sleep of a museum docent, the “centuries of boredom” that Fukuyama feared, because of the great “postmodern invention of recycling”: We shall not be spared the worst—that is, History will not come to an end—since the leftovers, all the leftovers—the Church, communism, ethnic groups, conflicts, ideologies—are indefinitely recyclable.

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 2 Mar 2015

In countries like Thailand, India, and Malaysia, arresting people on the basis of their Internet conversations and activities is the norm. I’ll talk about risks and harms in Chapter 7; right now, I want to stick to capabilities. GOVERNMENT HACKS Electronic espionage is different today from what it was in the pre-Internet days of the Cold War. Before the Internet, when surveillance consisted largely of government-on-government espionage, agencies like the NSA would target specific communications circuits: that Soviet undersea cable between Petropavlovsk and Vladivostok, a military communications satellite, a microwave network.

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Edgar, attempted intimidation of King by, 98, 102–3 hop searches, 37–38 HTTPS Everywhere, 215, 216 Huawei, 74, 86, 182 Human Rights Watch, 96, 178 IBM, 104, 122 iCloud, 58 ICREACH, 67 identification, anonymity and, 131–33 identity theft, 116–19 iMacs, 58 imperfection, systemic, resilience and, 163–64 IMSI-catchers, 68, 165–66 independence, oversight and, 162–63, 169, 177–78 India, 76 individuals, data rights of, 192–93, 200–203, 211, 232 data storage by, 18–19 see also mass surveillance, individual defenses against inferences, from data mining, 34–35, 258, 259 and correlation of data sets, 40–42 error rates in, 34, 54, 136–37, 269 information fiduciaries, 204–5 information middlemen: Internet’s empowering of, 57–58 monopolistic nature of, 57 Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, 121–22 InfoUSA, 53 Initiate Systems, 41 Instagram, 58 intelligence community, US, 67 budget of, 64–65, 80 fear and, 228 international partnerships of, 76–77 private contractors in, 80, 228 revolving door in, 80 see also specific agencies Internal Revenue Service, US (IRS), 137, 159 International Association of Privacy Professionals, 124 International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance, 167, 168–69 International Telecommunications Union, 106, 187 Internet: anonymity on, 43–44, 131–33 benefits of, 8 commons as lacking on, 188–89 cyberattacks on, see cyberwarfare deliberate insecurity of, 7, 146–50, 182 early history of, 119 fee-based vs. ad-based business model of, 50, 56, 206 freedom of, 107, 188 government censorship and control of, 94–95, 106–7, 187–88, 237 identification and, 131–33 information middlemen and, see information middlemen international nature of, 6–7, 187–88, 209, 220–21 laws and, 220–21 as media source, 15 physical wiring of, 64 privacy and, 203–4, 230–31 traditional corporate middlemen eliminated by, 56–57 trust and, 181–82 Internet companies, transparency reports of, 207–8 Internet Movie Database, 43 Internet of Things, 15–17 Internet searches, NSA collection of data on, 22 Internet surveillance, 47–51 advertising and, see advertising, personalized cable companies and, 48–49 cookies and, 47–48, 49 global, 69–71 NSA and, 62, 64–65, 78, 122, 149–50, 188, 207 ubiquity of, 32 see also mass surveillance, corporate iPads, 58 iPhones, 31, 42, 58 Iran: government surveillance in, 71–72 Stuxnet cyberattack on, 75, 132, 146, 150 Iraq War, 65 IRC, 119 Israel: mass surveillance by, 182 Stuxnet cyberattack by, 75, 132, 146, 150 US intelligence data shared with, 77 Israeli assassination team, identification of, 43 ISS (Intelligence Support Systems) World, 81 iTunes store, 57 Jawbone, 16 Jay-Z, 48 Joint Terrorism Task Forces, 69 journalists, government surveillance and, 96 JPMorgan Chase, 116 judiciary, surveillance and, 168, 170, 179–80 justice, as core American value, 230 Justice Department, US, 184, 186 Kerry, John, 101 keyboard loggers, 25 key escrow, 120–21 keyword searches, 28, 261 Kindle, 28, 59 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 237 Hoover’s attempted intimidation of, 98, 102–3 Kinsey, Alfred, database of, 44 Klein, Mark, 250, 288 Kunstler, James, 206 Kurds, 76 Lanier, Jaron, 201 Lavabit, 83–84, 209 law enforcement, state and local: abuse of power by, 135, 160 IMSI-catchers used by, 68 location data and, 2, 243 militarization of, 184 predictive algorithms used by, 98–99, 100, 137, 159 racism in, 184 secrecy of, 100, 160 transparency and, 170 lawyers, government surveillance and, 96 legal system: as based on human judgment, 98–99 government surveillance and, 168, 169 secrecy and, 100 Lenddo, 111, 113 Level 3 Communications, 85 Levison, Ladar, 84 liberty: commons and, 189 as core American value, 230 social norms and, 227 liberty, government surveillance and, 6, 91–107, 184 abuses of power in, 101–5, 160, 234–35 anonymity and, 133 censorship and, 94–95, 106–7, 187–88 and changing definition of “wrong,” 92–93, 97–98 discrimination and, 103–4 fear and, 4, 7, 95–97, 135, 156–57, 171, 182–83, 222, 226, 227–30 Internet freedom and, 106–7, 188 political discourse and, 97–99 secrecy and, 99–101 security and, 135, 157–59, 361–62 ubiquitous surveillance and, 92, 97 Library of Congress, 199 Libya, 81 license plate scanners, 26–27, 40 storage of data from, 36 lifelogging, 16 Lincoln, Abraham, 229 Little Brother (Doctorow), 217 location data, 1–3, 28, 39, 62, 243, 339 advertising and, 39–40 de-anonymizing with, 44 embedded in digital photos, 14–15, 42–43 selling of, 2 Locke, John, 210 Los Angeles Police Department, 160 LOVEINT, 102, 177 Lower Merion School District, 104 LulzSec hacker movement, 42 MAC addresses, 29 MacKinnon, Rachel, 210, 212 Madrid Privacy Declaration (2009), 211–12 Magna Carta, information age version of, 210–12 manipulation, surveillance-based, 113–16 Manning, Chelsea, 101 marijuana use, 97 MARINA, 36 Mask, The, 72 Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission, 263 mass surveillance: algorithmic-based, 129–31, 159, 196 as automated process, 5, 129–31 dangers of, 4–5, 6 economic harms from, 6–7, 121–22, 151 false positives in, 137, 138, 140, 323–24 fatalism and, 224–25 lack of consent in, 5, 20, 51 metadata in, 20–23 minimum necessary, 158–59, 176, 211 moratorium urged on new technologies of, 211 noticing, 223 security harmed by, 7, 146–50 social norms and, 226–38 society’s bargains with, 4, 8–9, 47, 49–51, 58–59, 60–61, 158, 226, 235–38 speaking out about, 223–24 targeted surveillance vs., 5, 26, 139–40, 174, 179–80, 184, 186 transparency and, 159–61, 169, 170–71, 176 ubiquity of, 5, 26–28, 32, 40, 53, 92, 97, 224, 233 urgency of fight against, 233–35 see also data collection; data mining mass surveillance, corporate, 46–61, 86–87 advertising and, see advertising, personalized business competitiveness and, 119–24 cost of, to US businesses, 123–24 customers as products in, 53, 58 customer service and, 47 data brokers and, see data brokers discrimination and, 109–13 error rates in, 54 feudal nature of, 58–59, 61, 210–12 free services and convenience exchanged for, 4, 49–51, 58–59, 60–61, 226, 235–36 growth of, 23–24 harms from, 108–18 lobbying and, 233 manipulation and, 113–16 manipulation through, 6 market research and, 47 privacy breaches and, 116–18, 142, 192, 193–95 secrecy and, 194 see also mass surveillance, public-private partnership in mass surveillance, corporate, solutions for, 7, 190–212 accountability and liability in, 192, 193–95, 196–97, 202 data quality assurance and, 181, 192, 194, 202 government regulation in, 192, 196–99, 210 individual participation and, 192 and limits on data collection, 191, 192, 199–200, 202, 206 and limits on data use, 191, 192, 194, 195–97, 206 lobbying and, 209, 222–23 and resistance to government surveillance, 207–10 and respect for data context, 202 rights of individuals and, 192, 200–203, 211 salience and, 203–4 security safeguards and, 192, 193–95, 202, 211 specification of purpose and, 192 transparency and, 192, 194, 196, 202, 204, 207–8 mass surveillance, government, 5–6, 62–77 chilling effects of, 95–97 in China, 70, 86, 140, 209 cloud computing and, 122 corporate nondisclosure agreements and, 100 corporate resistance to, 207–10 cost of, 91 cost of, to US businesses, 121–23 democracy and, 6, 95, 97–99 discrimination and, 4, 6, 93 encryption technology and, 119–23 fear-based justification for, 4, 7, 95–97, 135, 156–57, 171, 182–83, 222, 226, 227–30, 246 fishing expeditions in, 92, 93 in France, 79 fusion centers in, 69, 104 gag orders in, 100, 122 geopolitical conflicts and, 219–20 global, 69–71 growth of, 24–25 hacking in, 71–74 as harmful to US global interests, 151 as ineffective counterterrorism tool, 137–40, 228 international partnerships in, 76–77, 169 lack of trust in US companies resulting from, 122–23, 181–83 liberty and, see liberty, government surveillance and location data used in intimidation and control by, 2 mission creep and, 104–5 oversight and accountability in, 161–63, 169 in Russia, 70, 187, 188, 237 mass surveillance, government ( continued) secrecy of, 99–101, 121, 122 subversion of commercial systems in, 82–87 in UK, 69, 79 US hypocrisy about, 106 see also mass surveillance, public-private partnership in; specific agencies mass surveillance, government, solutions for, 7, 168–89 adequacy and, 168 and breakup of NSA, 186–87 due process and, 168, 184 illegitimate access and, 169, 177 integrity of systems and, 169, 181–82 international cooperation and, 169, 180, 184 judicial authority and, 168, 179–80 legality and, 168, 169 legitimacy and, 168 limitation of military role in, 185–86 lobbying and, 222 “Necessary and Proportionate” principles of, 167, 168–69 necessity and, 168 oversight and, 169, 172–78 proportionality and, 168 separation of espionage from surveillance in, 183–84 targeted surveillance and, 179–80, 184, 186 transparency and, 169, 170–71, 176 trust and, 181–83 user notification and, 168 whistleblowers and, 169, 178–79 mass surveillance, individual defenses against, 7, 213–25 avoidance in, 214 blocking technologies in, 214–17 breaking surveillance technologies, 218–19 distortion in, 217–18 fatalism as enemy of, 224–25 political action and, 213, 222–24, 237–38 mass surveillance, public-private partnership in, 6, 25, 78–87, 207 government subversion of commercial systems in, 82–87 nondisclosure agreements and, 100 privately-made technology in, 81–82, 100 sale of government data in, 79–80 and value neutrality of technology, 82 material witness laws, 92 McCarthyism, 92–93, 229, 234 McConnell, Mike, 80 McNealy, Scott, 4 media: fear and, 229 pre-Internet, 15 medical devices, Internet-enabled, 16 medical research, collection of data and, 8 Medtronic, 200 memory, fallibility of, 128, 320 Merkel, Angela, 151, 160–61, 183, 184 metadata, 216 from cell phones, see cell phone metadata data vs., 17, 23, 35, 251 from Internet searches, 22–23 in mass surveillance, 20–23, 67 from tweets, 23 Michigan, 2, 39 Microsoft, 49, 59–60, 84, 148, 221, 272, 359 customer loyalty to, 58 government demands for data from, 208, 359 increased encryption by, 208 transparency reports of, 207 Mijangos, Luis, 117 military, US: ban on domestic security role of, 185–86 Chinese cyberattacks against, 73 “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy of, 197 drone strikes by, 94 see also Army, US; Cyber Command, US; Defense Department, US MINARET, 175 Minority Report (film), 98 mission creep, 104–5, 163 Mitnick, Kevin, 116 Moglen, Eben, 95, 318 money transfer laws, 35–36 Monsegur, Hector, 42 Mori, Masahiro, 55 MS Office, 60 Multiprogram Research Facility, 144 Muslim Americans, government surveillance of, 103–4 MYSTIC, 36 Napolitano, Janet, 163 Narent, 182 narrative fallacy, 136 Nash equilibrium, 237 Natanz nuclear facility, Iran, 75 National Academies, 344 National Counterterrorism Center, 68 National Health Service, UK, 79 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), proposed takeover of cryptography and computer security programs by, 186–87 National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), 67 National Security Agency, US (NSA): backdoors inserted into software and hardware by, 147–48 Bermuda phone conversations recorded by, 23 “Black Budget” of, 65 cell phone metadata collected by, 20–21, 36, 37, 62, 138, 339 “collect” as defined by, 129, 320 “collect it all” mentality of, 64–65, 138 COMSEC (communications security) mission of, 164–65, 346 congressional oversight of, 172–76 “connect-the-dots” metaphor of, 136, 139 cost to US businesses of surveillance by, 121–22, 151 counterterrorism mission of, 63, 65–66, 184, 222 counterterrorism successes claimed by, 325 cryptanalysis by, 144 cyberattacks by, 149–50 drug smugglers surveilled by, 105 economic espionage by, 73 encryption programs and, 85–86, 120–21 encryption standards deliberately undermined by, 148–49 expanding role of, 24, 165 FISA Amendments Act and, 174–75, 273 foreign eavesdropping (SIGINT) by, 62–63, 76, 77, 122–23, 164–65, 186, 220 Germany surveilled by, 76, 77, 122–23, 151, 160–61, 183, 184 Gmail user data collected by, 62 historical data stored by, 36 history of, 62–63 inadequate internal auditing of, 303 innocent people surveilled by, 66–67 insecure Internet deliberately fostered by, 146–50, 182 international partnerships of, 76–77 Internet surveillance by, 22, 62, 64–65, 78, 86–87, 122–23, 149–50, 188, 207 keyword searches by, 38, 261 legal authority for, 65–66 location data used by, 3, 339 Multiprogram Research Facility of, 144 Muslim Americans surveilled by, 103 parallel construction and, 105, 305 Presidential Policy Directives of, 99–100 PRISM program of, 78, 84–85, 121, 208 proposed breakup of, 186–87 QUANTUM program of, 149–50, 329–30 relationship mapping by, 37–38 remote activation of cell phones by, 30 secrecy of, 99–100, 121, 122 SIGINT Enabling Project of, 147–49 Snowden leaks and, see Snowden, Edward SOMALGET program of, 65 Syria’s Internet infrastructure penetrated by, 74, 150 Tailored Access Operations (TAO) group of, 72, 85, 144, 149, 187 UN communications surveilled by, 102, 183 National Security Agency, US (NSA) ( continued) Unitarian Church lawsuit against, 91 US citizens surveilled by, 64, 66, 175 US global standing undermined by, 151 Utah Data Center of, 18, 36 vulnerabilities stockpiled by, 146–47 National Security Letters (NSLs), 67, 84, 100, 207–8 Naval Criminal Investigative Service, 69 Naval Research Laboratory, US, 158 Nest, 15–16 Netcom, 116 Netflix, 43 Netsweeper, 82 New Digital Age, The (Schmidt and Cohen), 4 newsgroups, 119 New York City Police Department, 103–4 New York State, license plate scanning data stored by, 36 New York Times, Chinese cyberattack on, 73, 132, 142 New Zealand, in international intelligence partnerships, 76 Nigeria, 81 9/11 Commission Report, 139, 176 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell), 59, 225 NinthDecimal, 39–40 NIST, see National Institute of Standards and Technology Nixon, Richard, 230 NOBUS (nobody but us) vulnerabilities, 147, 181 Nokia, 81 nondisclosure agreements, 100 North, Oliver, 127–28 Norway, 2011 massacre in, 229–30 NSA, see National Security Agency, US Oak Ridge, Tenn., 144 Obama, Barack, 33, 175 NSA review group appointed by, 176–77, 181 Obama administration: Internet freedom and, 107 NSA and, 122 whistleblowers prosecuted by, 100–101, 179 obfuscation, 217–18 Occupy movement, 104 Ochoa, Higinio (w0rmer), 42–43 OECD Privacy Framework, 191–92, 197 Office of Foreign Assets Control, 36 Office of Personnel Management, US, 73 Off the Record, 83, 215 Olympics (2014), 70, 77 Onionshare, 216 openness, see transparency opt-in vs. opt-out consent, 198 Orange, 79 Orbitz, 111 Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces, 69 Orwell, George, 59, 225 oversight, of corporate surveillance, see mass surveillance, corporate, solutions for, government regulation in oversight, of government surveillance, 161–63, 169, 172–78 Oyster cards, 40, 262 packet injection, 149–50 PageRank algorithm, 196 Palmer Raids, 234 Panetta, Leon, 133 panopticon, 32, 97, 227 panoptic sort, 111 parallel construction, 105, 305 Pariser, Eli, 114–15 Parker, Theodore, 365 PATRIOT Act, see USA PATRIOT Act pen registers, 27 Peoria, Ill., 101 personalized advertising, see advertising, personalized personally identifying information (PII), 45 Petraeus, David, 42 Petrobras, 73 Pew Research Center, 96 PGP encryption, 215, 216 photographs, digital, data embedded in, 14–15, 42–43 Pirate Party, Iceland, 333 Placecast, 39 police, see law enforcement, state and local police states, as risk-averse, 229 political action, 7, 213, 222–24, 237–38 political campaigns: data mining and, 33, 54 personalized marketing in, 54, 115–16, 233 political discourse, government surveillance and, 97–99 politics, politicians: and fear of blame, 222, 228 technology undermined by, 213 Posse Comitatus Act (1878), 186 Postal Service, US, Isolation Control and Tracking program of, 29 Presidential Policy Directives, 99–100 prices, discrimination in, 109–10 PRISM, 78, 84–85, 121, 208 privacy, 125–33 algorithmic surveillance and, 129–31, 204 as basic human need, 7, 126–27 breaches of, 116–18, 192, 193–95 as fundamental right, 67, 92, 126, 201, 232, 238, 318, 333, 363–64 of healthcare data, 193 Internet and, 203–4, 230–31 loss of, 4, 7, 50–51, 96, 126 and loss of ephemerality, 127–29 “nothing to hide” fallacy and, 125 and proposed Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, 201, 202 security and, 155–57 social norms and, 227, 230–33 third-party doctrine and, 67–68, 180 as trumped by fear, 228 undervaluing of, 7–8, 50, 156, 194, 203–4 Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, 176, 177 privacy enhancing technologies (PETs), 215–16, 217 Privacy Impact Notices, 198, 211 probable cause, 184 Protect America Act (2007), 275 public-private partnership, see mass surveillance, public-private partnership in Qualcomm, 122 QUANTUM packet injection program, 149–50, 329–30 radar, high-frequency, 30 “ratters,” 117 Reagan, Ronald, 230 redlining, 109 Red October, 72 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (UK; 2000), 175 relationships, mapping of, 37–38 remote access Trojans (RATs), 117 resilience, systemic imperfections and, 163–64 retailers, data collected by, 14, 24, 51–52 revenge porn, 231 RFID chips, 29, 211 Richelieu, Cardinal, 92 rights, of consumers, see consumer rights risk, police states as averse to, 229 risk management, 141–42 Robbins, Blake, 104 robotics, 54–55 Rogers, Michael, 75 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 229, 230 Rousseff, Dilma, 151 RSA Security, 73, 84 rule of law, 210, 212 Russia: cyberwarfare and, 180 mandatory registration of bloggers in, 95 mass surveillance by, 70, 187, 188, 237 salience, 203–4 San Diego Police Department, 160 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 96 Saudi Arabia, 76, 187, 209 Saudi Aramco, 75 Schmidt, Eric, 4, 22, 57, 86, 125 schools, surveillance abuse in, 104 Schrems, Max, 19, 200 search engines, business model of, 113–14, 206 secrecy: corporate surveillance and, 194 of government surveillance, 99–101, 121, 122, 170–71 legitimate, transparency vs., 332–33 security, 135–51 airplane, 93, 158 attack vs. defense in, 140–43 balance between civil liberties and, 135 complexity as enemy of, 141 cost of, 142 data mining as unsuitable tool for, 136–40 and deliberate insecurity of Internet, 146–50 encryption and, see encryption fear and, 4, 7, 95–97, 135, 156–57, 171, 182–83, 222, 226, 227–30 hindsight and, 136 mass surveillance as harmful to, 7, 146–50 and misguided focus on spectacular events, 135 narrative fallacy in, 136 privacy and, 155–57 random vs. targeted attacks and, 142–43 risk management and, 141–42 social norms and, 227 surveillance and, 157–59 vulnerabilities and, 145–46 security cameras, see surveillance technology self-censorship, 95 Senate, US, Intelligence Committee of, 102, 172, 339 Sensenbrenner, Jim, 174 Sense Networks, 2, 40 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 63, 65, 136, 156, 169, 184, 207, 227, 229 SHAMROCK, 175 Shirky, Clay, 228, 231 Shutterfly, 269 Siemens, 81 SIGINT (signals intelligence), see National Security Agency, US, foreign eavesdropping by SIGINT Enabling Project, 147–49 Silk Road, 105 Skype, 84, 148 SmartFilter, 82 smartphones: app-based surveillance on, 48 cameras on, 41 as computers, 14 GPS tracking in, 3, 14, 216–17 MAC addresses and Bluetooth IDs in, 29 Smith, Michael Lee, 67–68 Snowden, Edward, 177, 178, 217 e-mail of, 94 Espionage Act and, 101 EU Parliament testimony of, 76 NSA and GCHQ documents released by, 6, 20, 40–41, 62, 65, 66, 67, 72, 74, 78, 96, 99–100, 121, 129, 144, 149, 150, 160–61, 172, 175, 182, 207, 223, 234, 238 Sochi Olympics, 70, 77 Socialists, Socialism, 92–93 social networking: apps for, 51 customer scores and, 111 customer tracking and, 123 data collected in, 200–201 government surveillance of, 295–96 see also specific companies social norms: fear and, 227–30 liberty and, 227 mass surveillance and, 226–38 privacy and, 227, 230–33 security and, 227 software: security of, 141, 146 subscription vs. purchase models for, 60 Solove, Daniel, 93 SOMALGET, 65 Sophos, 82 Sotomayor, Sonia, 95, 342 South Korea, cyberattack on, 75 spy gadgets, 25–26 SSL encryption, 85–86 SSL (TLS) protocol, 215 Standard Chartered Bank, 35–36 Staples, 110 Stasi, 23 Steinhafel, Gregg, 142 strategic oversight, 162, 172–77 StingRay surveillance system, 100, 165 Stross, Charles, 128 Stuxnet, 75, 132, 146 collateral damage from, 150 Supreme Court, US, 26, 180, 361–62 third-party doctrine and, 68 surveillance: automatic, 31–32 benefits of, 8, 190 as business model, 50, 56, 113–14, 206 cell phones as devices for, 1–3, 14, 28, 39, 46–47, 62, 100, 216–17, 219, 339 constant, negative health effects of, 127 cost of, 23–26 espionage vs., 170, 183–84 government abuses of, 101–5 government-on-government, 63, 73, 74, 75, 76, 158 hidden, 28–30 legitimate needs for, 219–20 as loaded term, 4 mass, see mass surveillance oversight and accountability in, 161–63, 169, 172–78 overt, 28, 30 perception of, 7–8 personal computers as devices for, 3–4, 5 politics and, 213 pre-Internet, 64, 71 principles of, 155–66 targeted, see targeted surveillance transparency and, 159–61, 169, 170–71, 176 surveillance technology: cameras, 14, 17, 31–32 cost of, 25–26 shrinking size of, 29 Suspicious Activity Reports (SAR), 138 Sweeney, Latanya, 44, 263–64 SWIFT banking system, 73 Swire, Peter, 160 Syria, 81 NSA penetration of Internet infrastructure in, 74, 150 System for Operative Investigative Measures (SORM; Russia), 70 tactical oversight, 162, 177–79 Tailored Access Operations group (TAO), 72, 85, 144, 149, 187 Taleb, Nassim, 136 Target, 33, 34, 55 security breach of, 142, 193 targeted advertising, see advertising, personalized targeted surveillance: mass surveillance vs., 5, 26, 139–40, 174, 179–80, 184, 186 PATRIOT Act and, 174 tax fraud, data mining and, 137 technology: benefits of, 8, 190–91 political undermining of, 213 privacy enhancing (PETs), 215–16, 217 see also surveillance technology telephone companies: FBI demands for databases of, 27, 67 historical data stored by, 37, 67 NSA surveillance and, 122 transparency reports of, 207–8 see also cell phone metadata; specific companies Teletrack, 53 TEMPORA, 79 Terrorism Identities Datamart Environment, 68, 136 terrorists, terrorism: civil liberties vs., 135 government databases of, 68–69 as justification for mass surveillance, 4, 7, 170–71, 226, 246 mass surveillance as ineffective tool for detection of, 137–40, 228 and NSA’s expanded mission, 63, 65–66 terrorists, terrorism ( continued) overly broad definition of, 92 relative risk of, 332 Uighur, 219, 287 uniqueness of, 138 see also counterterrorism; security; September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks thermostats, smart, 15 third-party doctrine, 67–68, 180 TLS (SSL) protocol, 215 TOM-Skype, 70 Tor browser, 158, 216, 217 Torch Concepts, 79 trade secrets, algorithms as, 196 transparency: algorithmic surveillance and, 196 corporate surveillance and, 192, 194, 196, 202, 207–8 legitimate secrecy vs., 332–33 surveillance and, 159–61, 169, 170–71, 176 Transparent Society, The (Brin), 231 Transportation Security Administration, US (TSA), screening by, 136, 137, 159, 231, 321 Treasury, US, 36 Truman, Harry, 62, 230 trust, government surveillance and, 181–83 truth in lending laws, 196 Tsarnaev, Tamerlan, 69, 77, 139 Turkey, 76 Turla, 72 Twitter, 42, 58, 199, 208–9 metadata collected by, 23 Uber, 57 Uighur terrorists, 219, 287 Ukraine, 2, 39 Ulbricht, Ross (Dread Pirate Roberts), 105 “uncanny valley” phenomenon, 54–55 Underwear Bomber, 136, 139 UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, 96 Unit 8200, 77 United Kingdom: anti-discrimination laws in, 93 data retention law in, 222 GCHQ of, see Government Communications Headquarters in international intelligence partnerships, 76 Internet censorship in, 95 license plate scanners in, 27 mission creep in, 105 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000) of, 175 United Nations: digital privacy resolution of, 232, 363–64 NSA surveillance of, 102, 183 United States: data protection laws as absent from, 200 economic espionage by, 73 Germany’s relations with, 151, 234 intelligence budget of, 64–65, 80 NSA surveillance as undermining global stature of, 151 Stuxnet cyberattack by, 75, 132, 146, 150 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 232 USA PATRIOT Act (2001), 105, 221, 227 Section 215 of, 65, 173–74, 208 Section 505 of, 67 US Cellular, 177 Usenet, 189 VASTech, 81 Verint, 2–3, 182 Verizon, 49, 67, 122 transparency reports of, 207–8 Veterans for Peace, 104 Vigilant Solutions, 26, 40 Vodafone, 79 voiceprints, 30 vulnerabilities, 145–46 fixing of, 180–81 NSA stockpiling of, 146–47 w0rmer (Higinio Ochoa), 42–43 Wall Street Journal, 110 Wanamaker, John, 53 “warrant canaries,” 208, 354 warrant process, 92, 165, 169, 177, 180, 183, 184, 342 Constitution and, 92, 179, 184 FBI and, 26, 67–68 NSA evasion of, 175, 177, 179 third-party doctrine and, 67–68, 180 Watson, Sara M., 55 Watts, Peter, 126–27 Waze, 27–28, 199 weapons of mass destruction, overly broad definition of, 92, 295 weblining, 109 WebMD, 29 whistleblowers: as essential to democracy, 178 legal protections for, 162, 169, 178–79, 342 prosecution of, 100–101, 178, 179, 222 Wickr, 124 Wi-Fi networks, location data and, 3 Wi-Fi passwords, 31 Wilson, Woodrow, 229 Windows 8, 59–60 Wired, 119 workplace surveillance, 112 World War I, 229 World War II, 229 World Wide Web, 119, 210 writers, government surveillance and, 96 “wrong,” changing definition of, 92–93 Wyden, Ron, 172, 339 XKEYSCORE, 36 Yahoo, 84, 207 Chinese surveillance and, 209 government demands for data from, 208 increased encryption by, 208 NSA hacking of, 85 Yosemite (OS), 59–60 YouTube, 50 Zappa, Frank, 98 zero-day vulnerabilities, 145–46 NSA stockpiling of, 146–47, 180–81 ZTE, 81 Zuckerberg, Mark, 107, 125, 126 Praise for DATA AND GOLIATH “Data and Goliath is sorely needed.

…

Edgar, attempted intimidation of King by, 98, 102–3 hop searches, 37–38 HTTPS Everywhere, 215, 216 Huawei, 74, 86, 182 Human Rights Watch, 96, 178 IBM, 104, 122 iCloud, 58 ICREACH, 67 identification, anonymity and, 131–33 identity theft, 116–19 iMacs, 58 imperfection, systemic, resilience and, 163–64 IMSI-catchers, 68, 165–66 independence, oversight and, 162–63, 169, 177–78 India, 76 individuals, data rights of, 192–93, 200–203, 211, 232 data storage by, 18–19 see also mass surveillance, individual defenses against inferences, from data mining, 34–35, 258, 259 and correlation of data sets, 40–42 error rates in, 34, 54, 136–37, 269 information fiduciaries, 204–5 information middlemen: Internet’s empowering of, 57–58 monopolistic nature of, 57 Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, 121–22 InfoUSA, 53 Initiate Systems, 41 Instagram, 58 intelligence community, US, 67 budget of, 64–65, 80 fear and, 228 international partnerships of, 76–77 private contractors in, 80, 228 revolving door in, 80 see also specific agencies Internal Revenue Service, US (IRS), 137, 159 International Association of Privacy Professionals, 124 International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance, 167, 168–69 International Telecommunications Union, 106, 187 Internet: anonymity on, 43–44, 131–33 benefits of, 8 commons as lacking on, 188–89 cyberattacks on, see cyberwarfare deliberate insecurity of, 7, 146–50, 182 early history of, 119 fee-based vs. ad-based business model of, 50, 56, 206 freedom of, 107, 188 government censorship and control of, 94–95, 106–7, 187–88, 237 identification and, 131–33 information middlemen and, see information middlemen international nature of, 6–7, 187–88, 209, 220–21 laws and, 220–21 as media source, 15 physical wiring of, 64 privacy and, 203–4, 230–31 traditional corporate middlemen eliminated by, 56–57 trust and, 181–82 Internet companies, transparency reports of, 207–8 Internet Movie Database, 43 Internet of Things, 15–17 Internet searches, NSA collection of data on, 22 Internet surveillance, 47–51 advertising and, see advertising, personalized cable companies and, 48–49 cookies and, 47–48, 49 global, 69–71 NSA and, 62, 64–65, 78, 122, 149–50, 188, 207 ubiquity of, 32 see also mass surveillance, corporate iPads, 58 iPhones, 31, 42, 58 Iran: government surveillance in, 71–72 Stuxnet cyberattack on, 75, 132, 146, 150 Iraq War, 65 IRC, 119 Israel: mass surveillance by, 182 Stuxnet cyberattack by, 75, 132, 146, 150 US intelligence data shared with, 77 Israeli assassination team, identification of, 43 ISS (Intelligence Support Systems) World, 81 iTunes store, 57 Jawbone, 16 Jay-Z, 48 Joint Terrorism Task Forces, 69 journalists, government surveillance and, 96 JPMorgan Chase, 116 judiciary, surveillance and, 168, 170, 179–80 justice, as core American value, 230 Justice Department, US, 184, 186 Kerry, John, 101 keyboard loggers, 25 key escrow, 120–21 keyword searches, 28, 261 Kindle, 28, 59 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 237 Hoover’s attempted intimidation of, 98, 102–3 Kinsey, Alfred, database of, 44 Klein, Mark, 250, 288 Kunstler, James, 206 Kurds, 76 Lanier, Jaron, 201 Lavabit, 83–84, 209 law enforcement, state and local: abuse of power by, 135, 160 IMSI-catchers used by, 68 location data and, 2, 243 militarization of, 184 predictive algorithms used by, 98–99, 100, 137, 159 racism in, 184 secrecy of, 100, 160 transparency and, 170 lawyers, government surveillance and, 96 legal system: as based on human judgment, 98–99 government surveillance and, 168, 169 secrecy and, 100 Lenddo, 111, 113 Level 3 Communications, 85 Levison, Ladar, 84 liberty: commons and, 189 as core American value, 230 social norms and, 227 liberty, government surveillance and, 6, 91–107, 184 abuses of power in, 101–5, 160, 234–35 anonymity and, 133 censorship and, 94–95, 106–7, 187–88 and changing definition of “wrong,” 92–93, 97–98 discrimination and, 103–4 fear and, 4, 7, 95–97, 135, 156–57, 171, 182–83, 222, 226, 227–30 Internet freedom and, 106–7, 188 political discourse and, 97–99 secrecy and, 99–101 security and, 135, 157–59, 361–62 ubiquitous surveillance and, 92, 97 Library of Congress, 199 Libya, 81 license plate scanners, 26–27, 40 storage of data from, 36 lifelogging, 16 Lincoln, Abraham, 229 Little Brother (Doctorow), 217 location data, 1–3, 28, 39, 62, 243, 339 advertising and, 39–40 de-anonymizing with, 44 embedded in digital photos, 14–15, 42–43 selling of, 2 Locke, John, 210 Los Angeles Police Department, 160 LOVEINT, 102, 177 Lower Merion School District, 104 LulzSec hacker movement, 42 MAC addresses, 29 MacKinnon, Rachel, 210, 212 Madrid Privacy Declaration (2009), 211–12 Magna Carta, information age version of, 210–12 manipulation, surveillance-based, 113–16 Manning, Chelsea, 101 marijuana use, 97 MARINA, 36 Mask, The, 72 Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission, 263 mass surveillance: algorithmic-based, 129–31, 159, 196 as automated process, 5, 129–31 dangers of, 4–5, 6 economic harms from, 6–7, 121–22, 151 false positives in, 137, 138, 140, 323–24 fatalism and, 224–25 lack of consent in, 5, 20, 51 metadata in, 20–23 minimum necessary, 158–59, 176, 211 moratorium urged on new technologies of, 211 noticing, 223 security harmed by, 7, 146–50 social norms and, 226–38 society’s bargains with, 4, 8–9, 47, 49–51, 58–59, 60–61, 158, 226, 235–38 speaking out about, 223–24 targeted surveillance vs., 5, 26, 139–40, 174, 179–80, 184, 186 transparency and, 159–61, 169, 170–71, 176 ubiquity of, 5, 26–28, 32, 40, 53, 92, 97, 224, 233 urgency of fight against, 233–35 see also data collection; data mining mass surveillance, corporate, 46–61, 86–87 advertising and, see advertising, personalized business competitiveness and, 119–24 cost of, to US businesses, 123–24 customers as products in, 53, 58 customer service and, 47 data brokers and, see data brokers discrimination and, 109–13 error rates in, 54 feudal nature of, 58–59, 61, 210–12 free services and convenience exchanged for, 4, 49–51, 58–59, 60–61, 226, 235–36 growth of, 23–24 harms from, 108–18 lobbying and, 233 manipulation and, 113–16 manipulation through, 6 market research and, 47 privacy breaches and, 116–18, 142, 192, 193–95 secrecy and, 194 see also mass surveillance, public-private partnership in mass surveillance, corporate, solutions for, 7, 190–212 accountability and liability in, 192, 193–95, 196–97, 202 data quality assurance and, 181, 192, 194, 202 government regulation in, 192, 196–99, 210 individual participation and, 192 and limits on data collection, 191, 192, 199–200, 202, 206 and limits on data use, 191, 192, 194, 195–97, 206 lobbying and, 209, 222–23 and resistance to government surveillance, 207–10 and respect for data context, 202 rights of individuals and, 192, 200–203, 211 salience and, 203–4 security safeguards and, 192, 193–95, 202, 211 specification of purpose and, 192 transparency and, 192, 194, 196, 202, 204, 207–8 mass surveillance, government, 5–6, 62–77 chilling effects of, 95–97 in China, 70, 86, 140, 209 cloud computing and, 122 corporate nondisclosure agreements and, 100 corporate resistance to, 207–10 cost of, 91 cost of, to US businesses, 121–23 democracy and, 6, 95, 97–99 discrimination and, 4, 6, 93 encryption technology and, 119–23 fear-based justification for, 4, 7, 95–97, 135, 156–57, 171, 182–83, 222, 226, 227–30, 246 fishing expeditions in, 92, 93 in France, 79 fusion centers in, 69, 104 gag orders in, 100, 122 geopolitical conflicts and, 219–20 global, 69–71 growth of, 24–25 hacking in, 71–74 as harmful to US global interests, 151 as ineffective counterterrorism tool, 137–40, 228 international partnerships in, 76–77, 169 lack of trust in US companies resulting from, 122–23, 181–83 liberty and, see liberty, government surveillance and location data used in intimidation and control by, 2 mission creep and, 104–5 oversight and accountability in, 161–63, 169 in Russia, 70, 187, 188, 237 mass surveillance, government ( continued) secrecy of, 99–101, 121, 122 subversion of commercial systems in, 82–87 in UK, 69, 79 US hypocrisy about, 106 see also mass surveillance, public-private partnership in; specific agencies mass surveillance, government, solutions for, 7, 168–89 adequacy and, 168 and breakup of NSA, 186–87 due process and, 168, 184 illegitimate access and, 169, 177 integrity of systems and, 169, 181–82 international cooperation and, 169, 180, 184 judicial authority and, 168, 179–80 legality and, 168, 169 legitimacy and, 168 limitation of military role in, 185–86 lobbying and, 222 “Necessary and Proportionate” principles of, 167, 168–69 necessity and, 168 oversight and, 169, 172–78 proportionality and, 168 separation of espionage from surveillance in, 183–84 targeted surveillance and, 179–80, 184, 186 transparency and, 169, 170–71, 176 trust and, 181–83 user notification and, 168 whistleblowers and, 169, 178–79 mass surveillance, individual defenses against, 7, 213–25 avoidance in, 214 blocking technologies in, 214–17 breaking surveillance technologies, 218–19 distortion in, 217–18 fatalism as enemy of, 224–25 political action and, 213, 222–24, 237–38 mass surveillance, public-private partnership in, 6, 25, 78–87, 207 government subversion of commercial systems in, 82–87 nondisclosure agreements and, 100 privately-made technology in, 81–82, 100 sale of government data in, 79–80 and value neutrality of technology, 82 material witness laws, 92 McCarthyism, 92–93, 229, 234 McConnell, Mike, 80 McNealy, Scott, 4 media: fear and, 229 pre-Internet, 15 medical devices, Internet-enabled, 16 medical research, collection of data and, 8 Medtronic, 200 memory, fallibility of, 128, 320 Merkel, Angela, 151, 160–61, 183, 184 metadata, 216 from cell phones, see cell phone metadata data vs., 17, 23, 35, 251 from Internet searches, 22–23 in mass surveillance, 20–23, 67 from tweets, 23 Michigan, 2, 39 Microsoft, 49, 59–60, 84, 148, 221, 272, 359 customer loyalty to, 58 government demands for data from, 208, 359 increased encryption by, 208 transparency reports of, 207 Mijangos, Luis, 117 military, US: ban on domestic security role of, 185–86 Chinese cyberattacks against, 73 “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy of, 197 drone strikes by, 94 see also Army, US; Cyber Command, US; Defense Department, US MINARET, 175 Minority Report (film), 98 mission creep, 104–5, 163 Mitnick, Kevin, 116 Moglen, Eben, 95, 318 money transfer laws, 35–36 Monsegur, Hector, 42 Mori, Masahiro, 55 MS Office, 60 Multiprogram Research Facility, 144 Muslim Americans, government surveillance of, 103–4 MYSTIC, 36 Napolitano, Janet, 163 Narent, 182 narrative fallacy, 136 Nash equilibrium, 237 Natanz nuclear facility, Iran, 75 National Academies, 344 National Counterterrorism Center, 68 National Health Service, UK, 79 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), proposed takeover of cryptography and computer security programs by, 186–87 National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), 67 National Security Agency, US (NSA): backdoors inserted into software and hardware by, 147–48 Bermuda phone conversations recorded by, 23 “Black Budget” of, 65 cell phone metadata collected by, 20–21, 36, 37, 62, 138, 339 “collect” as defined by, 129, 320 “collect it all” mentality of, 64–65, 138 COMSEC (communications security) mission of, 164–65, 346 congressional oversight of, 172–76 “connect-the-dots” metaphor of, 136, 139 cost to US businesses of surveillance by, 121–22, 151 counterterrorism mission of, 63, 65–66, 184, 222 counterterrorism successes claimed by, 325 cryptanalysis by, 144 cyberattacks by, 149–50 drug smugglers surveilled by, 105 economic espionage by, 73 encryption programs and, 85–86, 120–21 encryption standards deliberately undermined by, 148–49 expanding role of, 24, 165 FISA Amendments Act and, 174–75, 273 foreign eavesdropping (SIGINT) by, 62–63, 76, 77, 122–23, 164–65, 186, 220 Germany surveilled by, 76, 77, 122–23, 151, 160–61, 183, 184 Gmail user data collected by, 62 historical data stored by, 36 history of, 62–63 inadequate internal auditing of, 303 innocent people surveilled by, 66–67 insecure Internet deliberately fostered by, 146–50, 182 international partnerships of, 76–77 Internet surveillance by, 22, 62, 64–65, 78, 86–87, 122–23, 149–50, 188, 207 keyword searches by, 38, 261 legal authority for, 65–66 location data used by, 3, 339 Multiprogram Research Facility of, 144 Muslim Americans surveilled by, 103 parallel construction and, 105, 305 Presidential Policy Directives of, 99–100 PRISM program of, 78, 84–85, 121, 208 proposed breakup of, 186–87 QUANTUM program of, 149–50, 329–30 relationship mapping by, 37–38 remote activation of cell phones by, 30 secrecy of, 99–100, 121, 122 SIGINT Enabling Project of, 147–49 Snowden leaks and, see Snowden, Edward SOMALGET program of, 65 Syria’s Internet infrastructure penetrated by, 74, 150 Tailored Access Operations (TAO) group of, 72, 85, 144, 149, 187 UN communications surveilled by, 102, 183 National Security Agency, US (NSA) ( continued) Unitarian Church lawsuit against, 91 US citizens surveilled by, 64, 66, 175 US global standing undermined by, 151 Utah Data Center of, 18, 36 vulnerabilities stockpiled by, 146–47 National Security Letters (NSLs), 67, 84, 100, 207–8 Naval Criminal Investigative Service, 69 Naval Research Laboratory, US, 158 Nest, 15–16 Netcom, 116 Netflix, 43 Netsweeper, 82 New Digital Age, The (Schmidt and Cohen), 4 newsgroups, 119 New York City Police Department, 103–4 New York State, license plate scanning data stored by, 36 New York Times, Chinese cyberattack on, 73, 132, 142 New Zealand, in international intelligence partnerships, 76 Nigeria, 81 9/11 Commission Report, 139, 176 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell), 59, 225 NinthDecimal, 39–40 NIST, see National Institute of Standards and Technology Nixon, Richard, 230 NOBUS (nobody but us) vulnerabilities, 147, 181 Nokia, 81 nondisclosure agreements, 100 North, Oliver, 127–28 Norway, 2011 massacre in, 229–30 NSA, see National Security Agency, US Oak Ridge, Tenn., 144 Obama, Barack, 33, 175 NSA review group appointed by, 176–77, 181 Obama administration: Internet freedom and, 107 NSA and, 122 whistleblowers prosecuted by, 100–101, 179 obfuscation, 217–18 Occupy movement, 104 Ochoa, Higinio (w0rmer), 42–43 OECD Privacy Framework, 191–92, 197 Office of Foreign Assets Control, 36 Office of Personnel Management, US, 73 Off the Record, 83, 215 Olympics (2014), 70, 77 Onionshare, 216 openness, see transparency opt-in vs. opt-out consent, 198 Orange, 79 Orbitz, 111 Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces, 69 Orwell, George, 59, 225 oversight, of corporate surveillance, see mass surveillance, corporate, solutions for, government regulation in oversight, of government surveillance, 161–63, 169, 172–78 Oyster cards, 40, 262 packet injection, 149–50 PageRank algorithm, 196 Palmer Raids, 234 Panetta, Leon, 133 panopticon, 32, 97, 227 panoptic sort, 111 parallel construction, 105, 305 Pariser, Eli, 114–15 Parker, Theodore, 365 PATRIOT Act, see USA PATRIOT Act pen registers, 27 Peoria, Ill., 101 personalized advertising, see advertising, personalized personally identifying information (PII), 45 Petraeus, David, 42 Petrobras, 73 Pew Research Center, 96 PGP encryption, 215, 216 photographs, digital, data embedded in, 14–15, 42–43 Pirate Party, Iceland, 333 Placecast, 39 police, see law enforcement, state and local police states, as risk-averse, 229 political action, 7, 213, 222–24, 237–38 political campaigns: data mining and, 33, 54 personalized marketing in, 54, 115–16, 233 political discourse, government surveillance and, 97–99 politics, politicians: and fear of blame, 222, 228 technology undermined by, 213 Posse Comitatus Act (1878), 186 Postal Service, US, Isolation Control and Tracking program of, 29 Presidential Policy Directives, 99–100 prices, discrimination in, 109–10 PRISM, 78, 84–85, 121, 208 privacy, 125–33 algorithmic surveillance and, 129–31, 204 as basic human need, 7, 126–27 breaches of, 116–18, 192, 193–95 as fundamental right, 67, 92, 126, 201, 232, 238, 318, 333, 363–64 of healthcare data, 193 Internet and, 203–4, 230–31 loss of, 4, 7, 50–51, 96, 126 and loss of ephemerality, 127–29 “nothing to hide” fallacy and, 125 and proposed Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, 201, 202 security and, 155–57 social norms and, 227, 230–33 third-party doctrine and, 67–68, 180 as trumped by fear, 228 undervaluing of, 7–8, 50, 156, 194, 203–4 Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, 176, 177 privacy enhancing technologies (PETs), 215–16, 217 Privacy Impact Notices, 198, 211 probable cause, 184 Protect America Act (2007), 275 public-private partnership, see mass surveillance, public-private partnership in Qualcomm, 122 QUANTUM packet injection program, 149–50, 329–30 radar, high-frequency, 30 “ratters,” 117 Reagan, Ronald, 230 redlining, 109 Red October, 72 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (UK; 2000), 175 relationships, mapping of, 37–38 remote access Trojans (RATs), 117 resilience, systemic imperfections and, 163–64 retailers, data collected by, 14, 24, 51–52 revenge porn, 231 RFID chips, 29, 211 Richelieu, Cardinal, 92 rights, of consumers, see consumer rights risk, police states as averse to, 229 risk management, 141–42 Robbins, Blake, 104 robotics, 54–55 Rogers, Michael, 75 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 229, 230 Rousseff, Dilma, 151 RSA Security, 73, 84 rule of law, 210, 212 Russia: cyberwarfare and, 180 mandatory registration of bloggers in, 95 mass surveillance by, 70, 187, 188, 237 salience, 203–4 San Diego Police Department, 160 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 96 Saudi Arabia, 76, 187, 209 Saudi Aramco, 75 Schmidt, Eric, 4, 22, 57, 86, 125 schools, surveillance abuse in, 104 Schrems, Max, 19, 200 search engines, business model of, 113–14, 206 secrecy: corporate surveillance and, 194 of government surveillance, 99–101, 121, 122, 170–71 legitimate, transparency vs., 332–33 security, 135–51 airplane, 93, 158 attack vs. defense in, 140–43 balance between civil liberties and, 135 complexity as enemy of, 141 cost of, 142 data mining as unsuitable tool for, 136–40 and deliberate insecurity of Internet, 146–50 encryption and, see encryption fear and, 4, 7, 95–97, 135, 156–57, 171, 182–83, 222, 226, 227–30 hindsight and, 136 mass surveillance as harmful to, 7, 146–50 and misguided focus on spectacular events, 135 narrative fallacy in, 136 privacy and, 155–57 random vs. targeted attacks and, 142–43 risk management and, 141–42 social norms and, 227 surveillance and, 157–59 vulnerabilities and, 145–46 security cameras, see surveillance technology self-censorship, 95 Senate, US, Intelligence Committee of, 102, 172, 339 Sensenbrenner, Jim, 174 Sense Networks, 2, 40 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 63, 65, 136, 156, 169, 184, 207, 227, 229 SHAMROCK, 175 Shirky, Clay, 228, 231 Shutterfly, 269 Siemens, 81 SIGINT (signals intelligence), see National Security Agency, US, foreign eavesdropping by SIGINT Enabling Project, 147–49 Silk Road, 105 Skype, 84, 148 SmartFilter, 82 smartphones: app-based surveillance on, 48 cameras on, 41 as computers, 14 GPS tracking in, 3, 14, 216–17 MAC addresses and Bluetooth IDs in, 29 Smith, Michael Lee, 67–68 Snowden, Edward, 177, 178, 217 e-mail of, 94 Espionage Act and, 101 EU Parliament testimony of, 76 NSA and GCHQ documents released by, 6, 20, 40–41, 62, 65, 66, 67, 72, 74, 78, 96, 99–100, 121, 129, 144, 149, 150, 160–61, 172, 175, 182, 207, 223, 234, 238 Sochi Olympics, 70, 77 Socialists, Socialism, 92–93 social networking: apps for, 51 customer scores and, 111 customer tracking and, 123 data collected in, 200–201 government surveillance of, 295–96 see also specific companies social norms: fear and, 227–30 liberty and, 227 mass surveillance and, 226–38 privacy and, 227, 230–33 security and, 227 software: security of, 141, 146 subscription vs. purchase models for, 60 Solove, Daniel, 93 SOMALGET, 65 Sophos, 82 Sotomayor, Sonia, 95, 342 South Korea, cyberattack on, 75 spy gadgets, 25–26 SSL encryption, 85–86 SSL (TLS) protocol, 215 Standard Chartered Bank, 35–36 Staples, 110 Stasi, 23 Steinhafel, Gregg, 142 strategic oversight, 162, 172–77 StingRay surveillance system, 100, 165 Stross, Charles, 128 Stuxnet, 75, 132, 146 collateral damage from, 150 Supreme Court, US, 26, 180, 361–62 third-party doctrine and, 68 surveillance: automatic, 31–32 benefits of, 8, 190 as business model, 50, 56, 113–14, 206 cell phones as devices for, 1–3, 14, 28, 39, 46–47, 62, 100, 216–17, 219, 339 constant, negative health effects of, 127 cost of, 23–26 espionage vs., 170, 183–84 government abuses of, 101–5 government-on-government, 63, 73, 74, 75, 76, 158 hidden, 28–30 legitimate needs for, 219–20 as loaded term, 4 mass, see mass surveillance oversight and accountability in, 161–63, 169, 172–78 overt, 28, 30 perception of, 7–8 personal computers as devices for, 3–4, 5 politics and, 213 pre-Internet, 64, 71 principles of, 155–66 targeted, see targeted surveillance transparency and, 159–61, 169, 170–71, 176 surveillance technology: cameras, 14, 17, 31–32 cost of, 25–26 shrinking size of, 29 Suspicious Activity Reports (SAR), 138 Sweeney, Latanya, 44, 263–64 SWIFT banking system, 73 Swire, Peter, 160 Syria, 81 NSA penetration of Internet infrastructure in, 74, 150 System for Operative Investigative Measures (SORM; Russia), 70 tactical oversight, 162, 177–79 Tailored Access Operations group (TAO), 72, 85, 144, 149, 187 Taleb, Nassim, 136 Target, 33, 34, 55 security breach of, 142, 193 targeted advertising, see advertising, personalized targeted surveillance: mass surveillance vs., 5, 26, 139–40, 174, 179–80, 184, 186 PATRIOT Act and, 174 tax fraud, data mining and, 137 technology: benefits of, 8, 190–91 political undermining of, 213 privacy enhancing (PETs), 215–16, 217 see also surveillance technology telephone companies: FBI demands for databases of, 27, 67 historical data stored by, 37, 67 NSA surveillance and, 122 transparency reports of, 207–8 see also cell phone metadata; specific companies Teletrack, 53 TEMPORA, 79 Terrorism Identities Datamart Environment, 68, 136 terrorists, terrorism: civil liberties vs., 135 government databases of, 68–69 as justification for mass surveillance, 4, 7, 170–71, 226, 246 mass surveillance as ineffective tool for detection of, 137–40, 228 and NSA’s expanded mission, 63, 65–66 terrorists, terrorism ( continued) overly broad definition of, 92 relative risk of, 332 Uighur, 219, 287 uniqueness of, 138 see also counterterrorism; security; September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks thermostats, smart, 15 third-party doctrine, 67–68, 180 TLS (SSL) protocol, 215 TOM-Skype, 70 Tor browser, 158, 216, 217 Torch Concepts, 79 trade secrets, algorithms as, 196 transparency: algorithmic surveillance and, 196 corporate surveillance and, 192, 194, 196, 202, 207–8 legitimate secrecy vs., 332–33 surveillance and, 159–61, 169, 170–71, 176 Transparent Society, The (Brin), 231 Transportation Security Administration, US (TSA), screening by, 136, 137, 159, 231, 321 Treasury, US, 36 Truman, Harry, 62, 230 trust, government surveillance and, 181–83 truth in lending laws, 196 Tsarnaev, Tamerlan, 69, 77, 139 Turkey, 76 Turla, 72 Twitter, 42, 58, 199, 208–9 metadata collected by, 23 Uber, 57 Uighur terrorists, 219, 287 Ukraine, 2, 39 Ulbricht, Ross (Dread Pirate Roberts), 105 “uncanny valley” phenomenon, 54–55 Underwear Bomber, 136, 139 UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, 96 Unit 8200, 77 United Kingdom: anti-discrimination laws in, 93 data retention law in, 222 GCHQ of, see Government Communications Headquarters in international intelligence partnerships, 76 Internet censorship in, 95 license plate scanners in, 27 mission creep in, 105 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000) of, 175 United Nations: digital privacy resolution of, 232, 363–64 NSA surveillance of, 102, 183 United States: data protection laws as absent from, 200 economic espionage by, 73 Germany’s relations with, 151, 234 intelligence budget of, 64–65, 80 NSA surveillance as undermining global stature of, 151 Stuxnet cyberattack by, 75, 132, 146, 150 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 232 USA PATRIOT Act (2001), 105, 221, 227 Section 215 of, 65, 173–74, 208 Section 505 of, 67 US Cellular, 177 Usenet, 189 VASTech, 81 Verint, 2–3, 182 Verizon, 49, 67, 122 transparency reports of, 207–8 Veterans for Peace, 104 Vigilant Solutions, 26, 40 Vodafone, 79 voiceprints, 30 vulnerabilities, 145–46 fixing of, 180–81 NSA stockpiling of, 146–47 w0rmer (Higinio Ochoa), 42–43 Wall Street Journal, 110 Wanamaker, John, 53 “warrant canaries,” 208, 354 warrant process, 92, 165, 169, 177, 180, 183, 184, 342 Constitution and, 92, 179, 184 FBI and, 26, 67–68 NSA evasion of, 175, 177, 179 third-party doctrine and, 67–68, 180 Watson, Sara M., 55 Watts, Peter, 126–27 Waze, 27–28, 199 weapons of mass destruction, overly broad definition of, 92, 295 weblining, 109 WebMD, 29 whistleblowers: as essential to democracy, 178 legal protections for, 162, 169, 178–79, 342 prosecution of, 100–101, 178, 179, 222 Wickr, 124 Wi-Fi networks, location data and, 3 Wi-Fi passwords, 31 Wilson, Woodrow, 229 Windows 8, 59–60 Wired, 119 workplace surveillance, 112 World War I, 229 World War II, 229 World Wide Web, 119, 210 writers, government surveillance and, 96 “wrong,” changing definition of, 92–93 Wyden, Ron, 172, 339 XKEYSCORE, 36 Yahoo, 84, 207 Chinese surveillance and, 209 government demands for data from, 208 increased encryption by, 208 NSA hacking of, 85 Yosemite (OS), 59–60 YouTube, 50 Zappa, Frank, 98 zero-day vulnerabilities, 145–46 NSA stockpiling of, 146–47, 180–81 ZTE, 81 Zuckerberg, Mark, 107, 125, 126 Praise for DATA AND GOLIATH “Data and Goliath is sorely needed.

Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations With Today's Top Comedy Writers
by Mike Sacks
Published 23 Jun 2014

You kind of take it as it is and move on and try to remember to be super grateful that you’re working in New York City on a show where you get to write this crazy stuff. My last two years were definitely the most fun I had on that show, because I wasn’t as obsessed with “Why didn’t that sketch get in?” Your first couple years, you think everything should be perfect. Once you let that go, it’s a really fun show to work on. You came of age pre-Internet, when a site like Funny or Die wasn’t even remotely possible. Do you think your writing and comedy style would have been different if you had grown up connected? Truthfully, I think it would have been bad for me. I think there’s a chance that I would never have left my hometown. The reason I left Philadelphia to begin with was that there was no sketch, no improv, and that’s what I really wanted to do.

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This guy was managing to be legitimately funny—as funny as any comedy writer out there—and he also had amazing taste in music. He made a point of pushing the things that people needed to know about to those who might not have known about them otherwise. I think younger writers might not be aware of how important fanzines were to music or comedy geeks pre-Internet. In many ways, fanzines were the only lifeline. Yes, absolutely. And they were very accessible, these fanzines. This was the equivalent of the Internet then. You had to piece everything together yourself. You had to reach out to like-minded people, and this was one of the few ways to do that.

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Nancy was the only strip I read every day throughout my childhood, and it had quite an impact. As the Mad cartoonist Wally Wood said about Nancy, “By the time you decided not to read it, you already had.” I think that’s something I always keep in mind with my own comics—always opt for clarity and simplicity. You grew up pre-Internet. To what degree do you think the Internet has changed comics? I’m not really sure. There are comics now being created on the Internet, but I’m not interested in reading that sort of thing. I’d just rather wait until it’s printed. I don’t like the aesthetics of seeing something like that lit up on the screen.

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
by Yochai Benkler
Published 14 May 2006

It makes nonmarket strategies--from individual hobbyists to formal, well-funded nonprofits--vastly more effective than they could be in the mass-media environment. The economics of this phenomenon are neither mysterious nor complex. Imagine the grade-school teacher who wishes to put together ten to twenty pages of materials on Viking ships for schoolchildren. Pre-Internet, he would need to go to one or more libraries and museums, find books with pictures, maps, and text, or take his own photographs (assuming he was permitted by the museums) and write his own texts, combining this research. He would then need to select portions, clear the copyrights to reprint them, find a printing house that would set his text and pictures in a press, pay to print a number of copies, and then distribute them to all children who wanted them.

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Depending on where the teacher is located, it is possible that these initial steps would have been insurmountable, particularly for a teacher in a poorly endowed community without easy access to books on the subject, where research would have required substantial travel. Even once these barriers were surmounted, in the precomputer, pre-Internet days, turning out materials that looked and felt like a high quality product, with highresolution pictures and maps, and legible print required access to capitalintensive facilities. The cost of creating even one copy of such a product would likely dissuade the teacher from producing the booklet.

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These effects mark neither breakdown nor transcendence, but they do represent an improvement over the world of television and telephone along most dimensions of normative concern with social relations. 631 We are seeing two effects: first, and most robustly, we see a thickening of preexisting relations with friends, family, and neighbors, particularly with those who were not easily reachable in the pre-Internet-mediated environment. Parents, for example, use instant messages to communicate with their children who are in college. Friends who have moved away from each other are keeping in touch more than they did before they had e-mail, because email does not require them to coordinate a time to talk or to pay longdistance rates.

Industry 4.0: The Industrial Internet of Things
by Alasdair Gilchrist
Published 27 Jun 2016

Therefore, the 32-bit binary address is split into four octets (8-bit) and maps to four decimal numbers separated by dots. IP ADDRESS 172 10101100 16 00010000 1 00000001 254 11111110 32-bit binary address -> 4 x 8 bits binary All IPv4 addresses conform to this four-byte format. IP has been around a long time and its method of addressing has evolved as circumstance dictated. During the pre-Internet days, IP addresses were used freely and without any real consensus as to what part was the network and what part was for hosts. Clearly for the protocol to succeed, there had to be an agreed structure so that anyone receiving an address packet could ascertain what network it belonged to and what its host identifier was.

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The Internet of Things has also provided the necessity for a larger address pool as it requires a protocol that has an address space large enough to cope with the demands of the potentially vast amounts of “things” that will be eventually connected to the Internet. IPv6 solves this problem by extending the addressable address space from 32 to 128 bits. Another reason is that IPv4 was designed pre-Internet, or rather in the Internet’s infancy when only a few universities and government establishments were connected. Consequently, IPv4 lacks many features that are considered necessities on the modern Internet, for example, IPv4 on its own does not provide any security features. With native IPv4, data has to be encrypted using some other security encryption application, such as SSL/TLS, before being transported across the Internet.

Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016
by Stewart Lee
Published 1 Aug 2016

Ordinary plant hardly worth saving.” The Conservatives can’t even see the point of flowers. It’s asking a lot to expect them to see the point of the BBC. It doesn’t even attract bees. As a student in the late summer of 1988, I was backpacking in the far south-east of Turkey, blissfully unaware in those distant, pre-Internet days that an undeclared civil war against the Kurds was now covertly under way. Not knowing I had anything to fear, I floated with vacant impunity through military manoeuvres and migrating masses, danced at an illegal Kurdish wedding, and happily ate a bag of nuts riddled with green worms. There is much to be said for stupidity.

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“I don’t think it could have, or at least not in the form it’s taken now,” concedes Wolf People’s founder, vocalist and co-guitarist (with Joe Hollick) Jack Sharp. “We were very much involved in collecting records and sampling, and interested in ’60s and ’70s subculture (as well as hip hop), in the ‘pre-Internet age’, but things were a lot harder to come by when you didn’t have the almost brain-numbing instant access to pretty-much-everything-ever that you have now. Getting involved in online record-collecting communities around 2002/3, when we were in our early twenties, had a massive impact on Tom and myself, and it still provides a lot of inspiration and ways of finding music that is still off the radar even now.”

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 15 Nov 2013

There is nothing wrong with their mission per se—some might even argue that this is what history is for—but most such accounts are peculiar in that, in their quest to tell a certain story about “the Internet,” they misrepresent and badly mangle the past, leaving us with an impoverished reading of history and a confused game plan for the future. This should make us pause to ponder if Internet-centrism—whatever its own origins in bad history—might be nudging us to rewrite the history of other, pre-Internet periods with one simple purpose: to establish a coherent teleological account of how all other technologies paved the way for “the Internet” and how their own governance failed to embrace “Internet values” and may have delayed the arrival of this “network of all networks.” This is the ideology of Internet-centrism at its purest: it suggests what kinds of questions we could and should be asking of the past.

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Now, one can disagree with Shaw about the goals, purposes, and social functions of cuisine, but it’s noteworthy that Shirky does none of that; he’s primarily interested in making an argument about “the Internet”—and with “the Internet” as his favorite causal explanation. The operating logic here is simple: pre-Internet meant expertise, post-Internet means populism; we are post-Internet, hence, populism. For Shirky, things just happen—remember, it’s a revolution, so all resistance is futile!—and as long as the people seem to be in charge, it all must be a good thing. By this logic—which celebrates massive cultural participation as worth pursuing in its own right, regardless of what it does to culture—even ratings of albums and songs that we generate on iTunes and Spotify might eventually be preferable to those of professional music critics.

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(New York: Walker & Company, 2007). On early crowdsourcing efforts by the Smithsonian, see “Smithsonian Crowd-sourcing since 1849!,” Smithsonian Institution Archives, April 14, 2011, http://siarchives.si.edu/blog/smithsonian-crowdsourcing-1849. I learned of Toyota’s efforts via this blog post on pre-Internet crowd-sourcing efforts: “Crowdsourcing Is Not New—the History of Crowdsourcing (1714 to 2010),” DesignCrowd, October 28, 2010, http://blog.designcrowd.com/article/202/crowdsourcing. 37 “Knowledge is taking on the shape of the Net”: David Weinberger, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now that the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 17.

This Is Not Fame: A "From What I Re-Memoir"
by Doug Stanhope
Published 5 Dec 2017

You could see an actor naked and hear them talk dirty in an R-rated movie but then you couldn’t drink, smoke, jack off or even heckle for that matter. So you go back home to drink, smoke, get naked and jack off to porn. Your cable porn wouldn’t show penetration and porn without penetration is like hockey without the fights, so you go out in those pre-Internet glory days to rent some real porn but you couldn’t rent real porn because you don’t have a credit card! Besides, if you jack off too much you’ll go blind, and if you’re going blind that’s the only way they’d allow you to smoke a joint. Well, there you have it. I went back to my gay phone sex job the next day only on the assurance that they’d let me work on one of the hard-core lines.

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And then I realize that he really can’t. Because he put it on the Internet. No laser or portrait of a screaming eagle will ever take it away. Too often I have first-time comedians email me, asking me to look at their first open-mic set that they have put on YouTube. I cannot imagine the horror of any comedian from my pre-Internet era finding their open-mic days now available for anyone to see. Or perhaps I can, as someone posted gut-churning awful VHS-era video they’d found of me only six months into comedy. Don’t post anything publicly without knowing that it’s more permanent than a tattoo. You may have done well onstage in relation to your lack of experience, and your peers might recognize that, but the general Internet public will not.

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News
by Clint Watts
Published 28 May 2018

Chris Anderson of Wired magazine famously detailed this phenomenon from a business perspective in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Building from the research of Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, Anderson explained how online access creates not just lower prices but increased product variety. In the pre-internet era, where traditional local markets offered only a small range of high-selling goods, the World Wide Web offered an opportunity for things like books, music, and homemade goods to be sold at lower volumes over an extended period. The “long tail” referred to a high-frequency power distribution.

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The first crowds on the internet and social media were more educated, experienced, and privileged—collectively smarter than the core. The experts at the core still held a repository of experience, reasoning, and knowledge to effectively harness the crowd’s energy for discrete tasks and specified disciplines, determining what insights and innovations were outpacing existing pre-internet libraries and industry practices. They were able to judge the merit of new discoveries and employ them. But today’s crowds are anyone and everyone with a cell phone and a Facebook account, very different from the limited and much smaller virtual crowds of only a decade ago. My experiences with the crowd—watching the mobs that toppled dictators during the Arab Spring, the hordes that joined ISIS, the counterterrorism punditry that missed the rise of ISIS, and the political swarms duped by Russia in the 2016 presidential election—lead me to believe that crowds are increasingly dumb, driven by ideology, desire, ambition, fear, and hatred, or what might collectively be referred to as “preferences.”

The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age
by Reid Hoffman , Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh
Published 15 Jan 2014

Network Intelligence Generates Hidden Data, Serendipity, and Opportunity As we’ve discussed, the most obvious function of network intelligence is to connect a company with outside information sources. Employee networks act as both a source and a filter for new information. The second function of network intelligence is its ability to provide access to “hidden data”—knowledge that isn’t publicly available. In the pre-internet era, reading secondary sources like business books or attending university courses helped professionals or companies beat the competition. Now, however, Google makes this kind of public information a commodity. To gain an edge, you need to use social networks to tap directly into what’s swirling around inside people’s brains.

Chicago Like a Local
by DK

You’ll find more cowboy boots here than you can shake a stick at (and we aren’t horsin’ around). g Vintage Gems g Contents Google Map KOKOROKOKO Map 2; 1323 North Milwaukee Avenue, Wicker Park; ///wires.scarcely.cabin; www.kokorokokovintage.com Flying the flag for Wicker Park’s vintage scene, this quirky store will transport you back to the pre-internet era. Pokémon stickers, Deee-Lite band posters, and Keith Haring prints cover the walls, a fitting backdrop for the 1980s and 90s-era clothes on the rails. Stop by to pick a cute crop top or a vintage Chicago Bulls jersey from the team’s heyday. » Don’t leave without a piece of cool Kokorokoko branded merch – the sticker featuring the store’s iconic mascot, Koko Kat, is a must.

Through the Glass Ceiling to the Stars: The Story of the First American Woman to Command a Space Mission
by Eileen M. Collins and Jonathan H. Ward
Published 13 Sep 2021

I also had an exciting future ahead of me: great people to work with, opportunities to fly, travel, good pay, and lots of responsibility. The leadership responsibilities at such a young age were much greater than those available in the civilian world. I continued following the progress of the women in the Air Force flight training program. In those pre-internet days, my only source of information was the occasional newspaper article. The good news was that all ten women in the first class had graduated and earned their wings. However, I realized that I needed a competitive advantage to get into the program. Gaining actual stick-and-rudder flying experience over the summer seemed like a good option.

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Chapter 6 AIR FORCE ACADEMY With several years of flying and command experience in the C-141, I had passed another of the qualification thresholds for the Air Force Test Pilot School, and I was becoming a more competitive prospect for NASA’s astronaut program. Now, I needed something to make me even more attractive as a candidate for my dream positions. In the pre-internet days of the 1980s, I learned about potential opportunities and their requirements by reading the Air Force Times, talking to the Air Force Personnel Center, and researching regulations. I had to keep an eye out for openings and be ready to apply when they became available. Nobody sought you out to tell you to apply.

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything
by Matthew Ball
Published 18 Jul 2022

Despite his far-reaching impact, Stephenson has consistently warned against a literal interpretation of his works—especially Snow Crash. In 2011, the novelist told the New York Times that “I can talk all day long about how wrong I got it”2 and, when asked about his influence on Silicon Valley by Vanity Fair in 2017, he reminded the publication to keep “in mind that [Snow Crash was written] pre-Internet as we know it, pre-Worldwide Web, just me making shit up.”3 As a result, we should be wary of reading too much into Stephenson’s specific vision. And while he coined the term “Metaverse,” he was far from the first to introduce the concept. In 1935, Stanley G. Weinbaum wrote a short story titled “Pygmalion’s Spectacles,” about the invention of magical VR-like goggles that produced a “movie that gives one sight and sound . . . you are in the story, you speak to the shadows, and the shadows reply, and instead of being on a screen, the story is all about you, and you are in it.”†4 Ray Bradbury’s 1950 short story “The Veldt” imagines a nuclear family in which the parents are supplanted by a virtual reality nursery that the children never want to leave.

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Importantly, none of this prevented businesses from making a profit on the internet, deploying a paywall, or building proprietary technology. Rather, the “openness” of the internet enabled more companies to be built, in more areas, reaching more users, and achieving greater profits, while also preventing pre-internet giants (and, crucially, telecom companies) from controlling it. Openness is also why the internet is largely considered to have democratized information, and why the majority of the most valuable public companies in the world today were founded (or were reborn) in the internet era. It’s not difficult to imagine how different the internet would be if it had been created by multinational media conglomerates in order to sell widgets, serve ads, harvest user data for profits, or control users’ end-to-end experience (something AT&T and AOL both tried but failed to pull off).

Tomorrow's Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future
by Richard Susskind
Published 10 Jan 2013

These pervasive, exponentially growing, innovative technologies will come to disrupt and radically transform the way lawyers and courts operate. Many of the changes brought by technology, and especially by Web 2.0, should be familiar to younger members of the legal profession, as full-fledged members of the Internet generation (which I define as those people who cannot remember a pre-Internet world). Interestingly, though, most young lawyers have not yet made the connection between their social use of information technology and its introduction and potential in their working lives. In summary, then, I am suggesting that the more-for-less challenge, liberalization, and information technology will together drive immense and irreversible change in the way that lawyers work.

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together
by Bruce Schneier
Published 14 Feb 2012

And it will happen again if society doesn't get better at both trust and security. Failures in trust have become global problems: The Internet brings amazing benefits to those who have access to it, but it also brings with it new forms of fraud. Impersonation fraud—now called identity theft—is both easier and more profitable than it was pre-Internet. Spam continues to undermine the usability of e-mail. Social networking sites deliberately make it hard for people to effectively manage their own privacy. And antagonistic behavior threatens almost every Internet community. Globalization has improved the lives of people in many countries, but with it came an increased threat of global terrorism.

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Anything that affects risk trade-offs through a deterrence effect will require time before you see any effects from it. Depending on the form of government, new institutional pressures can also be slow. So can security systems: time to procure, time to implement, time before they're used effectively. For example, the first people arrested for writing computer viruses in the pre-Internet era went unpunished because there weren't any applicable laws to charge them with. Internet e-mail was not designed to provide sender authentication; the result was the emergence of spam, a problem we're still trying to solve today. And in the U.S., the FBI regularly complains that the laws regulating surveillance aren't keeping up with the rapidly changing pace of communications technology.

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 16 Nov 2010

Unfortunately, virtually nothing about the current situation suggests that American foreign policy can muster enough decency and idealism to erect this new shiny pillar of Internet freedom; in its current incorporation, the Internet freedom agenda looks more like a marketing ploy. Recent developments indicate that Washington’s newly declared commitment to Internet freedom will be shaped by pre-Internet policies and alliances. Thus, even though a week before Clinton’s seminal speech Jordan, America’s staunchest ally in the Middle East, announced a new harsh Internet censorship law, she never referred to it (Clinton mentioned many other countries, like Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Tunisia nevertheless).

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The truth is that many of the opportunities created by a free-for-all anonymous Internet culture have been creatively exploited by people and networks that undermine democracy. For instance, it’s almost certain that a Russian white supremacist group that calls itself the Northern Brotherhood would have never existed in the pre-Internet era. It has managed to set up an online game in which participants—many of them leading a comfortable middle-class existence—are asked to videotape their violent attacks on migrant guest workers, share them on YouTube, and compete for cash awards. Crime gangs in Mexico have also become big fans of the Internet.

Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise)
by Andrew L. Russell
Published 27 Apr 2014

Kuo, “Political and Economic Issues for Internetwork Connections,” ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 5 (1975): 32–34. 43 David Loehwing, “Computer Networks: Data Communications Have Spread Out From the Center,” Barron’s National Business and Financial Weekly (February 16, 1976), 8. 44 Sirbu and Zwimpfer, “The Case of X.25,” 36–37; Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 149; Tony Rybczynski, “Commercialization of Packet Switching (1975–1985): A Canadian Perspective,” IEEE Communications Magazine (December 2009): 26–32; Rémi Déspres, “X.25 Virtual Circuits – Transpac in France – Pre-Internet Data Networking,” IEEE Communications Magazine (November 2010): 40–46. 45 Jean-Louis Grangé, oral history interview by Andrew L. Russell, April 3, 2012, Paris, France. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; Pouzin interview, Charles Babbage Institute. 46 Déspres, “X.25 Virtual Circuits.” 47 Rybczynski, “Commercialization of Packet Switching,” 26–31; Déspres, “X.25 Virtual Circuits”; Sirbu and Zwimpfer, “The Case of X.25,” 37–41; Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 152–161; Valérie Schafer, “Circuits Virtuels et Datagrammes: Une Concurrence à Plusieurs Échelles,” Histoire, Économie & Société 26 (2007): 29–48. 48 Rybczynski, “Commercialization of Packet Switching,” 26; Déspres interview, Charles Babbage Institute; Marc E.

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Day, John. Patterns in Network Architecture: A Return to Fundamentals. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall PTR, 2007. DeNardis, Laura. Protocol Politics: The Globalization of Internet Governance. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009. Déspres, Rémi. “X.25 Virtual Circuits – Transpac in France – Pre-Internet Data Networking.” IEEE Communications Magazine (November 2010), 40–46. DiMaggio, Paul J. and Walter W. Powell. “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields.” American Sociological Review 48 (1983): 147–160. Downey, Gregory J. “Virtual Webs, Physical Technologies, and Hidden Workers: The Spaces of Labor in Information Internetworks.”

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts
by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind
Published 24 Aug 2015

In the fourth quarter of 2012 alone $19.1 billion worth of goods were traded on eBay.101 Currently there are more than 700 million items listed on eBay. There are no physical markets with even a fraction of this inventory. eBay is also a good example of a service that has liberated what we call a ‘latent demand’. It is not that the trading currently conducted on eBay used to be carried on in a pre-Internet manner and somehow eBay has made it all a bit more convenient. Rather, eBay has created an entirely new market for many of its 150 million users. It has helped to release and satisfy a latent demand for trade that was not in evidence in the past. Linked closely to online retail and trading systems—indeed, to many online services—are reputation systems that allow customers to rate providers (and sometimes the reverse as well).

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This is the widespread phenomenon of searching the Internet for the lowest possible prices for some goods or service; which, in turn, may lead to an online purchase or perhaps to a more robust negotiation with conventional face-to-face providers. To sum up, when almost 3 billion people are connected to one network, they communicate and research very differently than in a pre-Internet world; but much more than this, they are also able to socialize, share, build communities, co-operate, crowdsource, compete, and trade in ways and on a scale that has no analogues in the analogue world. Systems and services such as Twitter, Facebook, eBay, and YouTube, all now household names, are leading examples of services that connected human beings have created.

Ready Player One
by Ernest Cline
Published 15 Feb 2011

Windows like this one were visible to only my avatar, so no one could read over my shoulder (unless I selected the option to allow it). My homepage was set to the Hatchery, one of the more popular gunter message forums. The Hatchery’s site interface was designed to look and operate like an old pre-Internet dial-up bulletin board system, complete with the screech of a 300-baud modem during the log-in sequence. Very cool. I spent a few minutes scanning the most recent message threads, taking in the latest gunter news and rumors. I rarely posted anything to the boards, even though I made sure to check them every day.

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And he would only address her as Leucosia, the name of her D and D character.” Ogden and Kira began dating. By the end of the school year, when it was time for her to return home to London, the two of them had openly declared their love for each other. They kept in touch during their remaining year of school by e-mailing every day, using an early pre-Internet computer bulletin board network called FidoNet. When they both graduated from high school, Kira returned to the States, moved in with Morrow, and became one of Gregarious Games’ first employees. (For the first two years, she was their entire art department.) They got engaged a few years after the launch of the OASIS.

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts
by Jill Abramson
Published 5 Feb 2019

Blogs like Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo were covering national security more skeptically and with more edge than the Times. And then there was Matt Drudge, whose Report readers depended on like their morning coffee. The immense traffic Drudge generated for any story his blog promoted became a source of leverage for him. Newspapers were attracting digital audiences that dwarfed the readership of their pre-internet days. If the same number of people had been buying the hard-copy newspaper, the Times would have been bathing in profits. The problem was that because the websites were free, the traffic they brought in was less valuable, making advertising on them very cheap. And the web was swimming in free alternatives and new all-digital news sites, most of which did almost none of the expensive, original reporting that made the survival of quality, legacy newspapers so crucial.

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With a raspy Minnesota accent and somewhat unkempt, Carr came up from alternative weekly newspapers; his was not the pedigreed résumé of most of his Times colleagues. He wanted young tigers in the hunt with him and helped recruit and mentor Brian Stelter, a 20-something television blogger who scooped up insider items and quickly became a prominent Times byline. Self-satisfaction had defined Times journalists of the pre-internet period. Most had enjoyed what they assumed would be lifelong job security. The Times’s hiring process was still protracted, but once a reporter or editor was hired, he or she joined an institution that was widely viewed as the best in journalism and, despite the rocky climate, one of the few places to do work of consistent value.

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She looked perfectly cast for her role as digital innovation czar, and she had the technical chops for the job. She was excited when veteran political reporter Dan Balz decided to give Snapchat a taste of the campaigns he covered. I first met Balz in the late 1980s when he was strictly a pen-and-notepad guy, in the pre-internet era. He was a superb reporter dedicated to conveying the substance and importance of national politics. When I had coffee with Haik I couldn’t help but think what Helen Dewar, a Post lifer who had covered the Senate for decades and looked down on anything faddish, would make of Haik or Balz on Snapchat.

Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload
by Mark Hurst
Published 15 Jun 2007

But most users have no idea that they need to learn new skills, since they already know how to use the computer. For a long time, users have only been taught “computer literacy,” the set of common actions in software: clicking buttons, selecting menus, opening and closing files. These skills were sufficient in the pre-Internet world of the 1980s, when computers were mostly used as glorified typewriters. But those skills are sorely inadequate in the age of bits. That old worldview is obsolete. Today the computer and all its software are much, much less important than the bits that they operate on. Bits, after all, are no longer caged inside the computer.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)
by Mindy Kaling
Published 1 Nov 2011

I had gone from competitive, bookish nerd to nervous target. If this was Heathers, I was Martha Dumptruck and this mean African kid was all three Heathers. I turned my obsessive teenage energy away from reading Mad magazine and focused on my diet. I didn’t have access to a lot of weight-loss resources, because this was pre-Internet. There was one Weight Watchers near us, but it shared a mini-mall parking lot with a sketchy Salvation Army, and my parents didn’t like the idea of taking me there for meetings. So I invented a makeshift diet formula: I would eat exactly half of what was put in front of me, and no dessert. Without exercising, I lost thirty pounds in about two months.

Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing)
by Douglas R. Dechow
Published 2 Jul 2015

Over the web full screen video is either present or not: i.e., experienced in and of itself. Shockwave is no different: just animations embedded within their own software. Ted Nelson’s version of the Internet was seamless, absolutely fluid. LS: The existing web as a set of containers for simulated pre-internet media. Yup. PS: Which brings us right back to James Joyce and Marcel Proust, authors whose writings swung toward multimedia…seamless multimedia; virtual reality…virtual reality not in the sense of Jaron Lanier, but Antonin Artaud. Most people believe Jaron Lanier coined the term virtual reality in the early 1980s.

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age
by Steven Johnson
Published 14 Jul 2012

Diversity, then, is an undeniable virtue on multiple levels. The question is whether a peer-produced news environment creates more or less of it. If you look at the overall system of journalism today, it seems preposterous to argue that there has been a decrease in the diversity of news and opinion, compared with the media landscape of the pre-Internet era. Every niche perspective—from the extremes of neo-Nazi hate groups to their polar opposites on the far Left—now has a publishing platform, and a global audience, that far exceeds anything they could have achieved in the age of mass media. The echo-chamber critics would no doubt accept this description of the overall system.

Computer: A History of the Information Machine
by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Nathan Ensmenger
Published 29 Jul 2013

In Chapter 7, on real-time computing, we have taken advantage of a new strand of literature to discuss the development of online consumer banking. In Chapters 8, 9, 10, and 11 we have made substantial additions to exploit the growing literature on the software professions, the semiconductor industry, pre-Internet networking, and the manufacture of computers. Unsurprisingly, Chapter 12, on the development of the Internet, is the most changed. The chapter has been extended and divided into two parts: the creation of the Internet, and the World Wide Web and its consequences. The latter part includes new material on e-commerce, mobile and consumer computing, social networking, and the politics of the Internet.

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From that point on, the rise of the web was unstoppable: by mid-1995 it accounted for a quarter of all Internet traffic, more than any other activity. In the meantime Microsoft, far and away the dominant force in personal computer software, was seemingly oblivious to the rise of the Internet. Its online service MSN was due to be launched at the same time as the Windows 95 operating system in August 1995. A proprietary network from the pre-Internet world, MSN had passed the point of no return, but it would prove an embarrassment of mistiming. Microsoft covered its bets by licensing the Mosaic software from Spyglass and including a browser dubbed Internet Explorer with Windows 95, but it was a lackluster effort. Microsoft was not the only organization frozen in the headlights of the Internet juggernaut.

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It
by Jonathan Zittrain
Published 27 May 2009

The Michelangelo virus created sharp anxiety in 1992, when antivirus companies warned that millions of hard drives could be erased by the virus’s dangerous payload. It was designed to trigger itself on March 6, the artist’s birthday. The number of computers actually affected was only in the tens of thousands—it spread only through the pre-Internet exchange of infected floppy diskettes– and it was soon forgotten.45 Had Michelangelo’s birthday been a little later in the year—giving the virus more time to spread before springing—it could have had a much greater impact. More generally, malicious viruses can be coded to avoid the problems of real-world viruses whose virulence helps stop their spread.

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It could offer a channel that remains permanently tuned to one Web site, or a channel that could be steered among a preselected set of sites, or a channel that can be tuned to any Internet destination the subscriber enters so long as it is not on a blacklist maintained by the cable or satellite provider. Indeed, some video game consoles are configured for broader Internet access in this manner.22 Puzzlingly parties to the network neutrality debate have yet to weigh in on this phenomenon. The closest we have seen to mandated network neutrality in the appliancized space is in pre-Internet cable television and post-Internet mobile telephony. Long before the mainstreaming of the Internet, the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992 allowed local broadcast television stations to demand that cable TV companies carry their signal, and established a limited regime of open-access cable channels.23 This was understandably far from a free-for-all of actual “signal neutrality” because the number of channels a cable service could transmit was understood to be limited.24 The must-carry policies—born out of political pressure by broadcasters and justified as a way of eliminating some bottleneck control by cable operators—have had little discernable effect on the future of cable television, except perhaps to a handful of home shopping and religious broadcasting stations that possess broadcast licenses but are of little interest to large television viewerships.25 Because cable systems of 1992 had comparatively little bandwidth, and because the systems were designed almost solely to transmit television and nothing else, the Act had little impact on the parched generative landscape for cable.

Creatures of a Day: And Other Tales of Psychotherapy
by Irvin D. Yalom
Published 24 Feb 2015

His colleagues had long ago given up trying to fix him up with women and had come to view him as a committed bachelor. Some faculty wives had tried to turn him into a family uncle by inviting him for holiday or celebratory family dinners. He had no close male friends or confidants, and although he had a steady stream of dates—most (in that pre-Internet time) stemming from newspaper personal ads—the relationships always fizzled out after a date or two. Naturally, I inquired into the quick endings, but he never gave me a clear answer, and even more odd, he appeared curiously uncurious about the matter. I tagged that also for future exploration.

Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child
by Bert Kreischer
Published 26 May 2014

I moved to New York to start a career in stand-up comedy that has taken me around the world and onto stages in places I could have never imagined. First, however, at the insistence of my father, I had to enroll (via correspondence) in what turned out to be the two hardest classes I had ever taken. These were pre-Internet classes, just a box of books and a test sent to me through the State of Florida, the same classes given to inmates at correctional facilities. In the end, I managed to get the credits I needed to get my degree, and today I sit here, a forty-year-old college graduate (barely), sincerely wondering: What if I had studied harder?

Navel Gazing: True Tales of Bodies, Mostly Mine (But Also My Mom's, Which I Know Sounds Weird)
by Michael Ian Black
Published 5 Jan 2016

It informed me that donating bone marrow requires surgery because bone marrow, unsurprisingly, is inside the actual bones. They have to drill down for it, like oil. Surgery requires hospitalization and anesthesia and recovery time and pain. How much pain? Minor, the pamphlet said. Some “bruising and soreness.” How much is “some”? The pamphlet did not elaborate. This was all pre-Internet, so I had no way of consulting Yelp for actual reviews of the procedure, but I have since done research and what I read seemed at odds with the “minor” pain promised in the pamphlet. One guy donated bone marrow without anesthesia and said, “It is the worst pain I have ever felt in my life.” Yeah, dummy, because they frack your bones.

Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-To-Peer Debates
by John Logie
Published 29 Dec 2006

Online piracy may now also include certain uses of “streaming” technologies from the Internet. This presentation is dubious from a legal standpoint, but it clearly illustrates the degree to which the RIAA has embraced “piracy” as an allencompassing term describing almost any unauthorized file transfer. To properly recover a pre-Internet understanding of piracy I will resort to the hoary rhetorical strategy of offering and interpreting dictionary definitions. Though this may seem blisteringly obvious, it is important to note that the figurative uses of piracy are grounded in an analogic comparison to the activities of physical, nautical pirates.

The Thank You Economy
by Gary Vaynerchuk
Published 1 Jan 2010

Imagine how many more people would have heard that we’d lost an unhappy customer’s business if the man who couldn’t get his coupon redeemed at Wine Library all those years ago had had a cell phone loaded with a Twitter and Facebook app. What’s more, the changes we’ve already seen are just the first little bubbles breaking on the water’s surface. The consumer Web is just a baby—many people reading this right now can probably clearly remember the world pre-Internet. The cultural changes social media have ushered in are already having a big impact on marketing strategies, but eventually, companies that want to compete are going to have to change their approach to everything, from their hiring practices to their customer service to their budgets. Not all at once, mind you.

Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty
by Peter Singer
Published 3 Mar 2009

Not only do we know a lot about the desperately poor, but we also have much more to offer them in terms of better health care, improved seeds and agricultural techniques, and new technologies for generating electricity. More amazing, through instant communications and open access to a wealth of information that surpasses the greatest libraries of the pre-Internet age, we can enable them to join the worldwide community—if only we can help them get far enough out of poverty to seize the opportunity. Economist Jeffrey Sachs has argued convincingly that extreme poverty can be virtually eliminated by the middle of this century. We are already making progress.

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason
by Dave Rubin
Published 27 Apr 2020

Ration how much of your life you’re willing to sacrifice online. Naturally, I want the internet to be as free and open as possible, but the way we consume it should be conservative in the true sense—as in literally conserving something worth saving. In this instance, your happiness and your sanity. Get in contact with old friends. If you have pre-internet pals, revive your relationships with them. It’s more important than you might think. It will remind you of who you were before this madness happened. It rekindles an element of innocence in your life, which is hard to find in an era of mass cynicism. Introduce yourself to your neighbors.

Long Game: How Long-Term Thinker Shorthb
by Dorie Clark
Published 14 Oct 2021

Our project, much more modest in scope, would never get that kind of money. I couldn’t blame him—of course he should take the million dollars! But there wasn’t much point to doing this project without him. Hundreds of hours of my life went up in smoke. The Musical Growing up in a small town in North Carolina, pre-internet, there weren’t a lot of windows into the outside world. I watched television and the blockbuster films that came to our local cinema. But generally, it was entertainment for the least common denominator—cartoon sketches of life, masquerading as the real thing. So when I discovered independent film as a young teenager—once in a great while, one of those films made its way to our local video store—I was enthralled.

Millionaire Teacher: The Nine Rules of Wealth You Should Have Learned in School
by Andrew Hallam
Published 1 Nov 2011

Scuttlebutt like a detective I’ve become a really big fan of online stock screens (such as Value Line) for narrowing down lists of businesses that meet selected, customized financial criteria, but for serious investors, stock screens are a starting point, not an ending point. The late Philip Fisher, author of Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, devised a pre-Internet system of kicking the tires of companies that interested him by visiting the customers of the businesses he liked while questioning their competitors as well. He would ask great questions like: “What are the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors?” and “What should you be doing (but are not yet doing) to maintain your competitive advantage?”

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media
by Peter Warren Singer and Emerson T. Brooking
Published 15 Mar 2018

Even more, you will be steered to them by the platforms’ own algorithms. As groups grow, it becomes possible for even the most far-flung of causes to coordinate and organize, to gain visibility and find new recruits. Flat-earthers, for instance, had little hope of gaining traction in a post–Christopher Columbus, pre-internet world. It wasn’t just because of the silliness of their views, but they couldn’t easily find others who shared them. Today, the World Wide Web has given the flat-earth belief a dramatic comeback. Proponents now have an active online community and an aggressive marketing scheme. They spread stories that claim government conspiracy, and produce slick videos that discredit bedrock scientific principles.

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See leaders engineers, 222, 234, 239 ENQUIRE, 38 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, 91 Euromaidan, 203 Evans, Josh, 227–28 Exon, James, 224 extension, 209 F Facebook activism, 86 algorithm, 46, 124, 139, 141, 209, 221, 251 Arab Spring, 126 arms dealers, 76–77 botnets, 139, 145–46 censorship and content moderation, 92, 171–72, 237, 239, 246 community, 169–70 content creation, 58, 247 Duterte and, 15 Egypt, revolution, 85 emotional contagion study, 162 fake accounts, 139–40, 142 fake news, 131, 132, 240 government surveillance on, 94 homophily, 123–25 Instagram and, 49 intelligence gathering, 177 Lookalike Audiences, 177 Macedonian disinformation, 118–21 Mexican cartels, 69–70 Myanmar genocide, 136 News Feed, 46 origin of, 42–47, 219, 265 Palestinians, 197 regulation, 228, 230–31, 242 Russia and, 111–14, 144, 206, 241 status update, 59 Sudan conflict, 135–36 terrorism and, 65, 194 transparency reports, 232 Tunisian slaughter, 85 Turkish coup, 90–95 virality vs. veracity, 119 WhatsApp and, 50 Facebook drilling, 13, 165 Facemash, 42–43 facial identity, 254 Fahlman, Scott, 37 fake accounts, 114, 139–42, 144, 147, 176 fake news cyberporn, 223–24 Macedonia and, 119–20, 240 Mumbai 2008 massacre, 63–64 origin of, 29, 131 pre-internet, 31 prevention of, 251 profitability of, 132 propaganda, 201 reality shows, 155–57 riots in India, 136 Russia and Ukraine, 204 Russian trolls, 111–14, 240 spread of, 130–31, 208–9, 266 Sudan conflict, 135–36 fans. See followers FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), 14 fear authoritarianism, 90 Facebook, 240, 241 of fake news, 233 of ISIS, 5–6, 7, 9, 11 Pepe meme, 193 Russian propaganda, 208 Federal Communications Commission, 218–19 Federal Election Commission, 242 Federal Security Service, 107 feedback loop (of social media), 3, 8 “Felina” (María del Rosario Fuentes Rubio), 69–70 50-Cent Army, 100–101 Filter Bubble, The (Pariser), 122 flame wars, 3, 12 flat-earthers, 123, 125 Flickr, 62 flight MH17, 71–77, 109–10, 115 Flynn, Michael Thomas, 79–82, 112, 176 “fog of war,” 17 Foley, James, 151–52 followers of citizen reporters, 197, 215 of Donald Trump, 3, 140 of fake account, 113–14 fake followers, 139–40, 142 of Jack Posobiec, 129 popularity, 139 super-spreaders, 130, 266 of terrorist groups, 152, 167–68, 235 Ford, Henry, 190 Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), 78 Fort Polk, 259–60 47 U.S.C. § 230 (1996), 224–25 4 Ds, 107 4chan, 173–74, 187 France, 7–8 Franceschi-Bicchierai, Lorenzo, 268 Franklin, Benjamin, 29 free speech, 145, 228–30, 238, 239, 266–67 Freedom Flotilla, 199 Freedom’s Secret Weapon, 192 #FreeMosul, 10–11 #FreeTibet, 141 Friendster, 45 Fuentes Rubio, María del Rosario, 69–70 fundraising, 9, 65, 128, 178 Furie, Matt, 187 future dangerous speech, 266–67 military training for, 258–60 recommendations for, 261–66 responsibility for, 267–73 of social media, 248–57 G Galloway, Scott, 248 Gamergate, 229–30 Gangster Disciples, 12 Garza, Alicia, 163 gaslighting, 116 Gaza City, 193–200 #GazaUnderAttack, 197 #GazaUnderFire, 195 Gen Next, 172 generative adversarial networks, 256–57 generative networks, 254–55 geographical data, 58–59 Gerasimov, Valery, 106 Gerasimov Doctrine, 106–7 Germany Center of Defense Against Disinformation, 211 communication in World War I, 181 cybersecurity, 241 propaganda in World War II, 7–8 refugees and, 206–7 Ghonim, Wael, 85 Giesea, Jeff, 192 Gilmore, John, 83 Gingrich, Newt, 142 Goebbels, Joseph, 32–33, 192 Golden Shield Project, 96–97 Google ISIS and, 152, 236–37 laws governing, 225 origin of, 40, 219 profits, 119 regulation, 228 searches, 45 transparency reports, 232 See also YouTube Google Brain project, 249 Google Maps, 63, 72 Google Play Store, 48 Google Translate, 8 Gore, Al, 39 Gorka, Sebastian, 112 Great Firewall, 96, 102, 184, 253 growth Facebook users, 46 hours spent online, 137 internet use, 39, 44, 51–52, 95 smartphone use, 48 Twitter use, 48–49 Gumbel, Bryant, 24 Gurría, José Ángel, 40–41 Gutenberg, Johannes, 28 GVA Dictator Alert, 75–76 H Haberman, Maggie, 169 Hacker News (forum), 222 hacktivists, 212–13 Hammami, Omar, 160 harassment, online, 227–28, 235, 250–51 harmony, in China, 96, 98, 101 Harper, Stephen, 60 Harrman, John, 134 hasbara, 198, 199–200 Hassan, Ruqia, 70 hate crimes, 238–39 Hayes, Rutherford B., 31 Hearst, William Randolph, 31, 46 Heider, Fritz, 157 Hero with a Thousand Faces, The (Campbell), 159 Herrman, John, 221 Hezbollah, 65 Higgins, Eliot, 72, 75, 109 hijacking hashtags, 141, 152, 195, 231 memes, 191, 192–93 Russia and, 111 Hills, The (TV show), 155, 158 Hitler, Adolf, 33, 76, 186, 259 Hoefflinger, Mike, 222 homophily confirmation bias and, 125–26, 130 consequences, 124–25, 208 definition, 123 during elections, 132–33 Russia and Ukraine, 201–2 of social media companies, 145–46 validation vs. information, 134 honeypot, 115 Howdy Doody Show, The (TV show), 33 Hrabove plane crash, 71 Hu Jintao, 96, 98 Huffman, Steve, 241 Hughes, Seamus, 170 human intelligence (HUMINT), 78 Hurley, Chad, 218 Hussain, Junaid, 148–49, 150, 158, 167–68, 195 hyperlinks, 38 hypertext, 38 hypertext markup language (HTML), 38, 44 hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), 38 I identity masking technology, 89–90 India, 62–67, 89, 136 Indonesia, 213 influence botnets, 144–45 campaign ads, 178 confirmation bias, 121, 125, 130, 132–33, 137, 208 elections.

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy
by Tom Slee
Published 18 Nov 2015

Schneiderman wanted the names and addresses of all 15,000 Airbnb hosts in the city, Airbnb refused, talks broke down, and the company accused the Attorney General of a “fishing expedition.” 13 In the wake of the Snowden revelations the Attorney General’s demand was seen as another intrusive data-collection sweep by a government, and both the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Internet Association (“representing the leading internet companies”) stepped in on the side of Airbnb to “fight this tooth and nail.” 14 Meanwhile, Peers collected over 200,000 signatures on a petition to “save sharing in New York,” and Airbnb released a study touting the economic benefits it brings to the city and promoted videos in support of their position. Tensions were running high. Sharing Economy advocates presented the dispute as a conflict between well-heeled incumbents and regular New Yorkers making a little extra money to get by in a tough world; they argued that the laws were written for a pre-Internet landscape, and need to be updated to allow new industries to grow. Airbnb claims that “We all agree that illegal hotels are bad for New York, but that is not our community. Our community is made up of thousands of amazing people with kind hearts.” 15 The company published a report insisting that its hosts were almost all “regular New Yorkers, occasionally renting out the home in which they live,” 16 and that many of them were using that extra money to help them stay in their homes; they told stories that emphasized the person-to-person sharing of a living space.

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs
by Andy Kessler
Published 1 Feb 2011

The demand curve is the reflection of short-term responses that are given meaning only by the demander’s previous productive efforts. No way they’re equivalent. Supply creates demand—you know that, it’s Say’s law. It was invented in France in the nineteenth century, like this Haut-Brion.” He took another sip, and I refilled his glass, I know about Say’s law. Jean-Baptiste Say (1767 – 1832), businessman, economist, and pre-Internet futurist perhaps? He coined the word entrepreneur, so curse him every time you try to type that on a keyboard. I hate clinging to ideas from dead economists, but Say’s law is pretty simple and it holds true: supply constitutes demand. Sometimes it is misstated as “supply creates its own demand”—which is how John Maynard Keynes referred to it—but that’s not right.

Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else
by Steve Lohr
Published 10 Mar 2015

In that round, data technology helped reduce labor costs, change relations between manufacturers and retailers, and hasten the rise of efficient mass-merchandisers like Walmart. Yet most of that data was captive, from sources inside a company’s internal network, from its stores to its suppliers. It was the pre-Internet era of data mining. Today, the potential data sources are obviously far more abundant, but finding intelligence in the digital babble is the quandary. Enter Haydock and his data team. When I met him in Minnesota in the fall of 2013, Haydock had recently finished a project in New York and had begun making weekly shuttle-trips to Seattle.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: NYU Press, 2006). Jenkins and I don’t always agree, but he has been a constant source of inspiration and guidance for me at the Annenberg Innovation Lab. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Penguin, 1985). This was a pre-Internet look at the role of popular culture in pacifying the American public. His belief that Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future was correct is more true than ever. Mark Grief, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). Chapter Twelve: The Digital Renaissance Christopher Moyer, “How Google’s AlphaGo Beat Lee Sedol, a Go World Champion,” Atlantic, March 28, 2016, www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/the-invisible-opponent/475611/.

The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design
by Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth
Published 3 Oct 2019

The algorithmic challenge was actually the easier one—there have long been fast, scalable algorithms for computing fastest routes (or “shortest paths,” as they are called in computer science) from known traffic. A classical one is Dijkstra’s algorithm, named for the Dutch computer scientist who described it in the late 1950s. Such algorithms in turn allowed the informational problem to be solved by crowdsourcing. Even though early navigation apps operated on traffic data not much better than in the pre-Internet days, they could still at least suggest plausible routes through a complex and perhaps unfamiliar city—a vast improvement over the era of dense and confusing fold-up maps in the glove compartment. And once users started adopting the apps and permitting (wittingly or not) their location data to be shared, the apps now had thousands of real-time traffic sensors right there on the roadways.

The Wichita Lineman: Searching in the Sun for the World's Greatest Unfinished Song
by Dylan Jones
Published 29 Jul 2019

Later, looking deeper, I discovered Campbell had played guitar on the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, recorded the little-known Brian Wilson classic ‘Guess I’m Dumb’, and that he had played the guitar himself on ‘Lineman’, on a Danelectro six-string bass. As I got older, I became even more intrigued by ‘Lineman’, reading as much about it as I could find – which, pre-Internet, wasn’t much. I sought out Jimmy Webb concerts and Glen Campbell concerts, and once even wrote a piece about the provenance of the song for the Independent. As a teenager it was one of those records I listened to when I wanted to feel sad. Seriously, if you wanted to feel sorry for yourself, then ‘Wichita Lineman’ was the way to go.

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
by Cal Newport
Published 5 Feb 2019

As I write this chapter, the company is also in the process of building an online system to help nearby subscribers find each other and organize real-world book club meetings. The Mouse Book Club delivers a high-quality analog experience, but it couldn’t exist without many technological innovations of the past decade. I’m pointing this out to push back on the idea that high-quality leisure requires a nostalgic turning back of time to a pre-internet era. On the contrary, the internet is fueling a leisure renaissance of sorts by providing the average person more leisure options than ever before in human history. It does so in two primary ways: by helping people find communities related to their interests and providing easy access to the sometimes obscure information needed to support specific quality pursuits.

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language
by Amanda Montell
Published 27 May 2019

In the early 1990s, Sutton was a graduate student in the linguistics department at UC Berkeley when she was struck with an unquenchable thirst for unearthing the social subtext behind America’s favorite epithets. So over the course of two semesters, she conducted an experiment: Sutton had each of her 365 undergraduate students compile a list of ten slang words they and their friends used most frequently, plus their definitions. She then entered these into a giant database, like a pre-internet Urban Dictionary. Sutton’s plan was to analyze the terms on the basis of gender—to find out what they said about women’s and men’s places in the greater cultural dialogue. The students reported back with a veritable pupu platter of colorful words and expressions—3,788 of them, in total—on all different topics.

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs
by Kerry Howley
Published 21 Mar 2023

The greatest danger to the national security state was now ideological, morally serious twentysomethings finding themselves as they sifted through secrets their younger selves had promised to keep. They didn’t trust the bureaucracies they were in and didn’t feel intimidated by a media that would have seemed far away, inaccessible, in a pre-internet age of three networks and thick newspapers. The media was comprised of accessible personalities an email away. After Manning would come Edward Snowden, Reality Winner, and Daniel Hale. None of them had hit thirty-one on the day they blew the whistle. The most accessible personality, because the most persistent and ubiquitous and resistant to silence, was perhaps that of Glenn Greenwald, who was in 2012 a left-libertarian lawyer-turned-blogger.

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
by Tony Hsieh
Published 6 Jun 2010

We had a list of phone numbers for the different BBSs that were local calls for us, and we would call up each of the BBSs and connect to the electronic equivalent of a community cork bulletin board that students used in the reception area downstairs: Anyone could leave a message, post an ad, start a discussion, download files, or join in on a debate on a wide range of topics. It was the pre-Internet version of Craigslist. We soon discovered that the computer and phone line were not limited to just local calls, so we started making long-distance calls to BBSs all across the country. It was amazing being able to join in discussions with strangers from Seattle, New York, and Miami. We suddenly had access to an entire world that we didn’t know existed before.

You'll Grow Out of It
by Jessi Klein
Published 11 Jul 2016

The one other visual stimulus I remember obsessing over was the video for Billy Idol’s “Cradle of Love,” which featured a blond girl in booty shorts named “Devon” doing splits on a bed while a nerdy white guy hid in the corner of his apartment, terrified of this sexy girl and her subversive Billy Idol tape. This video was my equivalent of hard-core filth although in reality it was just dancing and light pillow fighting. What all of these naughty little blips had in common, aside from their G-ratedness, was that in the pre-Internet age, they could not be voluntarily summoned. I had to patiently wait for them to appear, like a bird-watcher waiting to see a sexy canary. But it was enough for me, and I never once thought about going through the process of trying to procure anything genuinely graphic, partially because I didn’t care and partially because it seemed like too much work.

Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It.
by Mitch Joel
Published 20 May 2013

While some businesses are beginning to capitalize on this by recognizing the value that comes from these relationships, most are still using these channels as a form of broadcast advertising. It’s almost as if businesses have become anesthetized because of their reliance in the past on using media channels as a gateway to the consumer. In the pre-Internet media world, your business could not have a direct relationship with the consumer. If you wanted to let people in your city know about your products or services, you had to take out advertising (few were great at direct marketing). The value of traditional media was not in the high quality of content that they produced, but rather in the direct relationship they had with an audience because of the perceived value of the content to the consumer.

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man
by Luke Harding
Published 7 Feb 2014

The Kremlin’s super-secret Federal Protection Service (FSO) – a branch of the FSB, that some believe is guarding Snowden – put in a large order for typewriters. The personal computer revolution that transformed communications had crashed to a halt. Those who cared about privacy were reverting to the pre-internet age. Typewriters, handwritten notes and the surreptitious rendezvous were back in fashion. Surely it was only a matter of time before the return of the carrier pigeon. The NSA’s clumsy international spying operation generated much heat and light. One document revealed the agency was even spying on the pornographic viewing habits of six Muslim ‘radicalisers’, in an attempt to discredit them.

Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else
by James Meek
Published 18 Aug 2014

And while the furore over the share price drew all the attention, in the background, something far more significant for Royal Mail’s future was happening. There was always something fantastical about the flotation. Right up to the moment of its disposal, the company had been portrayed by free marketeers and Tory commentators as a doomed behemoth, a pre-Internet, pre-Thatcher throwback, a state-milking army of overpaid, underworked, Luddite ne’er-do-wells jamming the cogs of the British economy. Suddenly, almost overnight, at the very moment it became too late to have second thoughts about the sale, the Royal Mail became a priceless national asset, its shares like gold, like Apple stock, with hard-nosed moguls from the world of big finance and nerdy stock pickers in suburban bungalows trampling over each other to get a piece.

Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)
by Christian Rudder
Published 8 Sep 2014

I was an exchange student in Japan for a summer in high school, and the agency officials in my host town, Utsunomiya, would occasionally collect me and the other Americans to visit a school or a factory nearby. The goal was as much for us to see the country as for it to see us. This was the early ’90s, pre-Internet, and Japan, not China, was still our big economic rival. There was tension; they had bought Rockefeller Center a few years before; the yen was threatening the dollar. The name of my exchange program captured the timbre of the visit in three words: Youth for Understanding. The name notwithstanding, I found the culture baffling.

But What if We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past
by Chuck Klosterman
Published 6 Jun 2016

It’s disorienting how rapidly this perception has normalized, particularly considering a central contradiction no one seems to deny—football is not only the most popular sport in the country, but a sport that is becoming more popular, assuming TV ratings can be trusted as a yardstick. It’s among the few remnants of the pre-Internet monoculture; it could be convincingly argued that football is more popular in America than every other sport combined. Over 110 million people watched the most recent Super Bowl, but that stat is a predictable outlier—what’s more stunning is the 25 million people who regularly watch the NFL draft.

The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment
by Guy Spier
Published 8 Sep 2014

As a result, I met Lou Simpson, whom Buffett had handpicked to invest GEICO’s money in stocks and whom he once described as “the best I know.” Another cornerstone of my reeducation involved studying Buffett’s investment strategy with even greater intensity. There’s no better way to do this than to read Berkshire Hathaway’s annual reports. In those pre-Internet days, that meant calling up the company and giving them my address over the phone. A few days later, my first copy of a Berkshire report, addressed by hand, arrived. It was a revelation. At D. H. Blair, I’d reviewed so many business plans with hockey-stick charts and predictions that only went up.

The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation
by Cathy O'Neil
Published 15 Mar 2022

It’s similar to the neural feedback we get when we eat or have sex or snort a line of cocaine. Crockett says that the brain evolved to reward behaviors that propagate the species. And keeping fellow community members in line passes that test. Outrage satisfies, even if it’s the product of a vile and baseless accusation. In the pre-internet age, an embarrassing moment like a fall in the soda aisle might have generated some jokes among friends and neighbors. But today a single slip can send the networked shame machinery into overdrive, turning it into a global event.[*] Egged on by algorithms, millions of us participate in these dramas, providing the tech giants with free labor.

The Actual One: How I Tried, and Failed, to Remain Twenty-Something for Ever
by Isy Suttie
Published 28 Jan 2016

We said, why of course, and then we went to a café for some ham and eggs. 24 Isy refrains from feeding hamburgers to the baby My only experience of raising a child occurred in the late nineties, when I persuaded my then musician boyfriend, Tom, to buy a Tamagotchi from London’s Chinatown. Tamagotchis were pre-Internet key ring–sized toys that were supposed to create the feeling of bringing up a kid—the toy was a “baby” and you had to feed it whenever it cried and teach it stuff and change its nappy. Tom was in a band, and we were living in a studenty house in South London. There was a TV in the back garden, facing the house, which was supposed to signify that TV watches you, not the other way round.

We're Going to Need More Wine: Stories That Are Funny, Complicated, and True
by Gabrielle Union
Published 16 Oct 2017

THANK GOD FOR JUDY BLUME, BECAUSE AT LEAST SHE ARMED ME WITH THE basic facts of menstruation. Nowadays, girls can Wikipedia everything—or more likely, study porn clips online. But back then, all we had was Judy Blume. She also gifted us with Forever. We all knew and loved Forever, because it had the Sex Scene. And outside of porn (which was damn hard to procure in those pre-Internet days), Forever was the only depiction of sex we had ever seen. High school senior Katherine meets fellow student Michael, who nicknames his penis “Ralph” and teaches her how to rub one out, before they go “all the way” in his sister’s bedroom. We were smart enough to know that Forever—not the cheesy VHS porn tapes that my trusty friend Becky had discovered in her parents’ room—taught us the more accurate portrait of how sex would unfold in our own lives.

The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution Is Making the World a Better Place
by Felix Marquardt
Published 7 Jul 2021

As I write this in the summer of 2020, during the midst of the pandemic, remote working has expanded exponentially, becoming a necessity to millions of workers. As with many things, the pandemic served to accelerate a trend that was already nascent: the location of an office matters less now than it did in the pre-internet age. For those lucky enough to be in an ‘office job’, there is no need for an ‘office’ at all. At first glance, it’s an enormously attractive idea, particularly for the young. You get to travel, potentially indefinitely, and do your work on your own terms. With internet connectivity spreading throughout the world, even to quite rural and remote areas, plausibly you can work from anywhere.

Only Americans Burn in Hell
by Jarett Kobek
Published 10 Apr 2019

“I am not certain,” said Celia. “It has been very painful.” The woman reached into her purse. She pulled out a book. She put the book in Celia’s hands. “Read this,” said the woman. “You will make sense of your children.” Celia looked down at the book. On its black cover, there were gold foil letters that said: The pre-Internet library of Fairy Land had never included a copy of the Bible. Not in any of its forms or translations. This was an oversight, particularly as the Bible was one of the three most influential literary works ever published. The other two were القرآن and the seven volumes of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter.

The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism
by Hubert Joly
Published 14 Jun 2021

My perspective started changing in the early 1990s, when two friends of mine asked whether I would write with them journal articles dealing with the philosophy and theology of work. This was a topic of great interest to me, so I said yes. I started with research. What did the Bible have to say about work? These were pre-internet days, so I turned to a biblical index, which conveniently listed all the sections of the Old and New Testaments that talk about work. Some, of course, I knew: humans got punished for messing up in paradise: Adam’s curse. But having not previously read the Bible cover to cover—and certainly not with this angle in mind!

And Here's the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft
by Mike Sacks
Published 8 Jul 2009

So why go from that to putting out a magazine with a circulation of a few hundred? After all the heavy stakes of network television — especially live network television — a little vanity project with no expectations felt like a cool drink of limeade. I wonder if the continuing fascination with Army Man has to do with the fact that it was produced pre-Internet. It was not widely distributed, and it was (and still is) very underground and mysterious. The Internet is a wondrous beast, but it has a leveling effect that trivializes and cheapens writing. There's something substantial and even formidable about print. You can't just erase it with a button.

…

You mean, to write a banjo blog instead of actually learning how to play a banjo? You would think that there would be no good artists or writers or musicians anymore, but there are plenty out there who are just as good as anyone from any other generation. And yet, there was something to be said for the learning process in the pre-Internet era. If you were really interested in an obscure movie or a little-known artist, you would go out and research on your own, and every little tidbit of information had such power and weight. Nowadays, you can just click on Wikipedia and learn everything in five minutes. The thrill of discovery is greatly lessened.

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World
by Timothy Garton Ash
Published 23 May 2016

If you hit the manual typewriter keys like a concert pianist playing Beethoven fortissimo, the maximum legible copies you could get from a single typing was about twelve: the samizdat dozen.166 A reader would devour the text in a single night’s passionate reading, then pass it on to a friend. Amidst the silence and darkness of the pre-internet world, Solzhenitsyn’s ‘one word of truth’ had a life-changing impact on the few it reached. Yet we should not underrate the new potential for individual broadcasting. After that 2013 New Year editorial in the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly was crudely censored, a well-known Chinese actress, Yao Chen, tweeted the logo of Southern Weekly on her Sina Weibo account, adding this line: ‘one word of truth shall outweigh the whole world—Solzhenitsyn (Russia)’.

…

16 While ‘censorship’ generally refers to something done by a state—and, in lawyerly definitions, often more narrowly to ‘prior restraint’ on publication—it’s important to remember that it is also exercised by religious organisations, corporations, media owners, criminal gangs, political parties and other organised groups. Between 1559 and 1966, the Roman Catholic Church had an ‘Index’ of prohibited books, a blacklist to which the title of the journal Index on Censorship, which documents, analyses and fights censorship worldwide, makes ironic reference.17 The difference, at least traditionally and in the pre-internet age, is that such censorship does not cover the whole territory of the country and all media in it, and is not directly enforced by the state. If you are censored in one paper, church, corporation or party, you can go to another. In practice, however, if your newspaper proprietor is threatening to sack you, a drug company to litigate you into bankruptcy or the mafia to assassinate you, that difference can feel rather theoretical.

Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers
by Michael Schrenk
Published 19 Aug 2009

Arriba Soft failed to identify the sources of the images it found and gave the general impression that the images it found were available under fair use statutes. While Kelly eventually won her case against Arriba Soft, it took five years of charges, countercharges, rulings, and appeals. Much of the confusion in settling the suit was caused by applying pre-Internet laws to determine what constituted fair use of intellectual property published online. * * * [82] US Copyright Office, "Copyright Office Basics," July 2006 (http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html). [83] US Copyright Office, "Copyright Registration for Online Works (Circular 66)," July 2006 (http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ66.html)

The Facebook era: tapping online social networks to build better products, reach new audiences, and sell more stuff
by Clara Shih
Published 30 Apr 2009

From the Library of Kerri Ross 204 Pa r t I I I Yo u r S te p - B y - S te p G u i d e to Us i n g Fa ce b o o k fo r B u s i n e s s The Innovator’s Dilemma Reaching this ideal will take time. You might recall in the early days of the World Wide Web, people weren’t quite sure what to make of and what to do with the new capabilities. As is typically the case in digital revolutions, the first Internet generation (what we call Web 1.0) merely applied pre-Internet concepts to a new medium. It was linear thinking. Company Web sites were just online versions of the company brochure. A phone call was the predominant call to action. It wasn’t until nearly a decade later that we began to realize and then slowly tap into the unique attributes of the Internet to do things that simply were not possible prior to the Internet: search engine marketing, user-generated content, automating manual business processes in Web applications, and allowing people to interact with those applications.

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts
by Joshua Hammer
Published 18 Apr 2016

“This commentator took a phrase from the work, and he gave his opinion about a point of jurisprudence,” he said, pointing to a cluster of Arabic characters squeezed into the margin. “There are several copies of this book around,” including one that had been transcribed by Timbuktu’s most illustrious scholar, Ahmed Baba, for his own library. “The big difference here is the notations.” The encyclopedia functioned as a kind of pre-Internet chat room, with the conversations attenuated over hundreds of years. Such encyclopedias proliferated during Timbuktu’s Golden Age, reflecting a desire to give coherence and order to Islamic scholarship from Timbuktu to Egypt and beyond, to confer recognition, even immortality upon learned men who had sought to enlarge the scope of human understanding.

Curation Nation
by Rosenbaum, Steven
Published 27 Jan 2011

Huffington, who Time magazine called the Web’s new oracle in 2009, is clear about the fact that what she’s doing is changing things, and some of that change will have a negative impact on so-called old media. She explains, “We are certainly at a turning point leading to the tipping point—an exciting prospect in my view. There needs to be a distinction between saving journalism and saving newspapers. The idea that you can go back to a pre-Internet world where you can create walled gardens around content, and charge for admission, is simply futile. Those who try that are going to fail.” She’s speaking about Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer, of course. She goes on, “Today we live in the linked economy, not a walled-off content economy.

1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in Its Downfall
by Peter Millar
Published 1 Oct 2009

This is a short ride on a rollercoaster of a profession that many people wish they could get into and a good many others wish they could get out of. An insider’s look at the [frequent] nuts and [often missing] bolts of the news business, in particular the ups and downs of being a foreign correspondent in the pre-internet days: from shouting, ‘No love, it’s the Warsaw Pact, not the Walsall Pact,’ over a crackly phone line to Sunday Times copytakers recently moved from the News of the World, to the joys of punching endless seemingly identical rows of holes in telex tape, of vandalising hotel telephone sockets to fit ‘crocodile clips’ to bare wires, and standing in phone boxes in the rain with ‘acoustic couplers’ clamped in an armpit.

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live
by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers
Published 2 Jan 2010

In his paper “The Nature of the Firm,” economist and Nobel laureate Ronald Coase coined the term “transaction costs” to refer to the cost of making any form of exchange or participating in a market.3 If you go to the supermarket, for example, and buy some groceries, your costs are not just the price of the groceries but the energy, time, and effort required to write your list, travel to and from the store, wheel around your cart and choose your products, wait in the checkout line, and unpack and put away the groceries when you get back home. Your total “costs” are greater than the dollar number on your receipt. In the pre-Internet age, the transaction costs of coordinating groups of people with aligned wants and needs or even just similar interests were high, making the sharing of products tricky and inconvenient. Redistributing unwanted goods in and outside your immediate community was inefficient. Matching someone with something to give with another person who wanted that same item was not straightforward.

The Dark Net
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 20 Aug 2014

Eighty of them became virtual friends with prolonged communication via private chat, and twenty-three of them became involved in abusive sexual behaviour. Tink Palmer is uniquely qualified to explain how the net has changed grooming. She is the Founding Director of the Marie Collins Foundation, a charity which helps victims of sexual abuse. When Tink first started working in the field, pre-internet, the accepted model of grooming was called the ‘Finkelhor Model’. It describes grooming for sexual abuse as a four-phase cycle. First, there is the motivation stage, when the abuser develops the desire to act. The second phase requires overcoming internal inhibitions – the emotional and moral qualms he or she might have.

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution
by Fred Vogelstein
Published 12 Nov 2013

Malone’s bold prediction spurred dozens of big companies to speed up their embrace of interactive television. One of the most famous was the Orlando Project in 1994, Time Warner’s failed effort in Florida to hook up four thousand homes with cable TV that allowed them to download movies on demand. The dream of convergence was the driving force behind pre–Internet browser dial-up services such as Prodigy and Compuserve, not to mention America Online, as far back as the 1980s. Those in the media industry—Malone, in particular—believed that controlling the television in the living room would be critical to convergence. They believed that the software and hardware they’d built to run televisions would just as easily run our PCs.

The Trouble With Billionaires
by Linda McQuaig
Published 1 May 2013

He made it, as a mere university student, by taking advantage of the technological inheritance provided by all those who had developed the Internet and, before that, the personal computer and, before that, the mainframe computer and, before that, the punched-card tabulating machine and, before that…all the way back to the invention of the wheel. It is estimated that about 90 per cent of any wealth generated today is due to this ‘knowledge inheritance’ of the past. If this sounds unlikely, imagine whether Zuckerberg could have created the Facebook empire if he had, say, been a student thirty years ago in the pre-Internet age, if he hadn’t attended college in the early 2000s, when computer advances had reached a certain stage of sophistication. Given these advances, he and a number of other bright students spotted the opportunity to develop a social networking program. If Zuckerberg hadn’t got Facebook off the ground in early 2004, any of his competitors would have soon got theirs off the ground and probably gone on to dominate the field.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
by Astra Taylor
Published 4 Mar 2014

True, blogs and other spaces on the Internet can serve as energizing and organizing tools for those who are disadvantaged or oppressed but, as research has established, minority groups already know more about the experiences of dominant groups than vice versa. The onus to nurture cultural diversity should be on those who are closer to the center, not those who are peripheral. But who occupies what position, center or periphery, inside or out, included or excluded? These categories are fluctuating, unstable. Back in the pre-Internet days, there were a few obvious ways to prove that diversity was lacking in the cultural realm, even if the actions needed to remedy it were too rarely taken. Directors Guild of America numbers provided incontrovertible proof of the celluloid ceiling. A quick flip through the television channels revealed a whitewashed nation.

When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Published 4 May 2015

I abhorred the process the last time we needed a car, but this time, thinking about it more intellectually, I was eager to take part in the elaborate ritual associated with buying a new car. Perhaps my willingness to haggle stemmed from my unlikely triumph the last time around. I had gotten an estimate faxed to me—this was pre-Internet—of what a fair price was to pay for the car. Stupidly, I left the sheet of paper at home, but I thought I remembered the price. I fought hard for that price: threatening repeatedly to leave, back and forth and back and forth, and finally I got the dealer within a few hundred dollars of the price I remembered.

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists
by Julia Ebner
Published 20 Feb 2020

For example, 30 per cent of leave voters believed in the Great Replacement conspiracy theory as opposed to 6 per cent among remain voters.37 Although there is no profile for conspiracy theorists, they tend to significantly overlap with individuals who feel negatively impacted by globalisation.38 In the 1960s, the American historian Richard Hofstadter wrote about the prevalence of a paranoid style in the rhetoric of ‘pseudo-conservatives’ as a combination of ‘heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy’.39 But today conspiracy theories are more numerous and more widespread than in the pre-internet age.40 Online alt-right activists have become the new ‘pseudo-conservatives’, sociologist Andrew Wilson of the University of Derby argues. They use conspiracy theories in combination with hashtag activism on social media to bring extremist viewpoints into the mainstream.41 Online tactics to spread conspiracy theories are getting ever more creative.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil
Published 25 Feb 2020

Four years after the Outrage meters, Slate’s then editor in chief Julia Turner indicated a change in vision when she told the Columbia Journalism Review, “Broadly the internet has been good at elevating the voices of people whose voices were not necessarily sufficiently represented in traditional pre-internet news coverage. I think that’s true about gender, I think it’s true about race, I think it’s true about sexuality” (“Slate’s ‘Pivot to Words,’” The Kicker podcast, January 25, 2018). The Sara Ahmed quote comes from a post on her blog, Feministkilljoys, entitled “Pushy Feminists” (November 17, 2014).

Nine Crises: Fifty Years of Covering the British Economy From Devaluation to Brexit
by William Keegan
Published 24 Jan 2019

The world of Prime Ministers, Chancellors and Governors of the Bank of England was still at one remove. I was thrust back into the world of fast feature writing: I would go into the office mid-morning (10.30 or 11 a.m.) and be told, ‘The National Provincial Bank and the Westminster Bank are merging. Can you write a feature on it by six o’clock?’ In those pre-internet days, physical files were very important. I would go to the FT’s library and ask for the relevant files, bury myself in them and then spend several hours on the phone. I would also compare notes with the chief leader writer, Robert (‘Bob’) Collin, who, to my mind, had one of the best brains among a galaxy of stars.

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
by Thomas Frank
Published 15 Mar 2016

More ominously, the twelve-hour rotating shift system would make it impossible for workers to participate in the life of their family or town: no more league sports or church choirs for them.8 The three union locals in Decatur quickly made common cause with one another, and before long a big part of the working population in that most typical American town were out protesting. With billboards, placards, newsletters, and the other publicity tools of that pre-Internet era, these aggrieved Midwesterners reached out across the country to tell the story of how their town had become a “war zone,” by which they meant to suggest that working-class Americans were in the crosshairs of a merciless new economic order. The workers turned out to be right about the war zone.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh
Published 14 Apr 2018

Technology platforms like Microsoft Windows demonstrated the power of being the chosen platform on which businesses were built back when the World Wide Web was still a glimmer in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye (Sir Berners-Lee wrote his proposal for a global hypertext system in 1989). Yet despite the proven value of platforms in the pre-Internet era, the Networked Age has made them vastly more powerful and valuable. Rather than being limited like the Republic of Venice to a specific geography, today’s software-based platforms can achieve global distribution almost immediately. And since transactions on today’s platforms are conducted through application programming interfaces (APIs) rather than person-to-person negotiations, they proceed swiftly, seamlessly, and in incredible volumes, all with barely any human intervention.

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World
by Joseph Menn
Published 3 Jun 2019

Bill was more into fringe culture—UFOs, secret societies, and B movies—than writing computer code. After War Games, he had to beg for a computer from uncomprehending parents who would not even get a telephone answering machine until the late 1990s. “I knew nothing about computers,” he said. “What I liked was the idea of a bulletin board, this pre-internet, glorified shortwave radio network.” Both boys were outsiders in Lubbock in cultural taste and also within an early internet scene that celebrated hacking feats. They were like the early punk rock bands, who weren’t going to be quiet just because they couldn’t play their instruments well. Avoiding the assigned work in his Catholic school, Bill helped mythologize the Cult of the Dead Cow along pseudoreligious lines by drafting an epic “Book of Cow” as his first text file.

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero
by Tyler Cowen
Published 8 Apr 2019

It is easy enough to see that the contemporary tech industry has plenty of firms that seem to dominate a particular area—just consider Google, Facebook, eBay, Netflix, Apple, Snapchat, Twitter, and Microsoft, among others. But what are we to make of this? Are these new tech monopolies as bad as the price-gouging monopolies of yore? At least so far, it hardly seems so. Many of these “monopolists,” if that is even the right word, charge either nothing or much lower fees than their pre-internet counterparts. eBay takes a commission and never has been connected to a zero-charge model, but typically it is much cheaper to put a lot of items on eBay than to cart them around to resale or antique stores and arrange for their disposition by consignment or outright sale. Microsoft charges for its software, but once you take multiple copies, educational discounts, and piracy into account, the company hardly seems like an extortionist.

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 4 Apr 2022

And it would have to know that fact not only for the price of milk but also for the price of meat, bread, and the thousands of other products that supermarkets usually stock. Second, the supermarket would have to find a way of segmenting the market and holding prices low just for the more responsive. In the pre-internet days, coupons were used for exactly this purpose. Sensitive customers snipped coupons and got price reductions for which insensitive customers were ineligible, allowing supermarkets to segment the market. But coupons were an inaccurate method of segmentation, and whilst the customers bearing coupons revealed themselves to be the sensitive customers, coupons didn’t typically use customers’ purchasing histories.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation
by Paris Marx
Published 4 Jul 2022

In 1981, it was expanded further by the National Science Foundation (NSF)—another public research agency—to connect more computer science departments to the network, and in 1985 the NSFNET was established to act as the public backbone connecting universities, government departments, and public agencies at an estimated cost of $200 million. But companies were also getting in on this new means of communication. By the late 1980s, regional commercial networks had been established, allowing users to send emails, connect to message boards, and share other information through a pre-internet network. They were often established with some public funding, but they were limited by the NSFNET’s Acceptable Use Policy that, at least officially, barred commercial traffic from the network. However, companies seeking to cash in on this evolving network infrastructure had influence over NSF decisions and the ears of powerful political figures.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World
by James Ball
Published 19 Jul 2023

In the earlier days of some of those political movements, while being somewhat sceptical of fact-checking alone, I suggested that ideas like critical thinking, media literacy and better information could make a big difference in our media landscape and make it harder for Q-style movements to flourish. It is something of a theological matter for journalists, especially investigative ones: if we can only provide the public with the information on what’s wrong, there will be action to make it better. All the evidence from the pre-internet era suggested that wouldn’t work. There was nothing in the fact-checking era to suggest that worked. When Facebook tried rolling out and funding systemic fact-checking on its network, movements like QAnon continued to flourish.13 Journalists like me kept trying on the same tactic, ignoring that it had never worked.

Please Report Your Bug Here: A Novel
by Josh Riedel
Published 17 Jan 2023

My mother and father, at the bar in New Orleans where they met. The ocean in Bolinas, my friend on the beach in the distance. “They look younger than us,” Noma said as my parents reappeared. “They married six weeks after they met.” “Imagine. How much can you possibly know anyone after only six weeks, especially pre-internet?” The photo flipped away. “They’re still married?” “They are,” I said, which was technically true: their separation was unofficial. Noma held the back of my chair. “This is an interesting collection.” She made it sound like I was a curator of a museum: Ethan Block, Curator of Ethan’s Work Laptop.

Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks
by Keith Houston
Published 23 Sep 2013

Edward Bok is the noblest work of God .”86 Bierce’s proposal of a “snigger point” or “note of cachinnation” (now almost extinct, “cachinnation” means “loud or immoderate laughter”) was itself an ironic act rather, his mark a mere prop with which to poke fun at unduly serious writers.87 Unsurprisingly, the did not catch on.* The last pre-Internet emoticons ambled casually into view at the end of the 1960s. First, in 1967, a Baltimore Sunday Sun columnist named Ralph Reppert was quoted in the May edition of Reader’s Digest. Reppert, writing that his “Aunt Ev is the only person I know who can write a facial expression,” explained that: Aunt Ev’s expression is a symbol that looks like this: —) It represents her tongue stuck in her cheek.

What Would Google Do?
by Jeff Jarvis
Published 15 Feb 2009

He may have thought of this law as his own, but I prefer to co-opt it as Weinberger’s Corollary to Jarvis’ First Law: “There is an inverse relationship between control and trust.” There’s another one of those counterintuitive lessons of the Google age: The more you control, the less you will be trusted; the more you hand over control, the more trust you will earn. That’s the antithesis of how companies and institutions operated in pre-internet history. They believed their control engendered our trust. In the early days of the internet, some journalists dismissed new sources of information—weblogs, Wikipedia, and online discussions—arguing that because they were not produced by fellow professionals, they could not be trusted. But the tragic truth is that the public does not trust journalists.

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion
by John Hagel Iii and John Seely Brown
Published 12 Apr 2010

Think of the objects around your workspace—the jar of sharp pencils, the portable flash drive, the bar of dark chocolate, the squeeze toy, the stapler you’re ready (if you’re a certain Silicon Valley CEO of our acquaintance) to throw at a subordinate when things go wrong. All of them are standing by at a moment’s notice, to be pulled in to help with the task at hand—even if the task isn’t sanctioned by your local HR representative. But we haven’t ever had the scalability of access that we have today. Consider how, pre-Internet, if you were looking for a particular book passage, but couldn’t remember which book it appeared in, you could only flip through the books on the shelf hoping to come across it. If you couldn’t find what you were seeking in your own books, you might have walked next door to see if your colleague had it.

Gray Lady Down: What the Decline and Fall of the New York Times Means for America
by William McGowan
Published 16 Nov 2010

I’ve read the New York Times since I was a kid, and I am proud to have been published prominently in it very early in my career. (The first things I ever published appeared in the Times Magazine and on the op-ed page.) I still consider the Times an important national resource, albeit an endangered one, and I confess to being one of those New Yorkers who refer to it simply as “the paper.” Pre-Internet, I would find myself wandering to the corner newsstand late at night and waiting like a junkie for a fix in the form of the next day’s edition. If I was out of town and couldn’t find it, I would jones. But sadly, those days, that young man and that New York Times are long gone. My aim is not to embarrass the Times or to feed a case for “going Timesless,” as some subscription cancellers and former readers have called it.

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era
by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith
Published 17 Aug 2015

And according to Brandon Busteed, executive director of education at Gallup, “Teachers are dead last among all professions Gallup studied in saying their ‘opinions count’ at work and their ‘supervisors create an open and trusting environment.’ ”8 Even if the world had stood still, the U.S. education bet would have been a colossal mistake. But the world raced forward. As we moved into the twenty-first century, the Internet exploded, changing our society and challenging our education system in profound ways. Pre-Internet, we lived in a world of knowledge scarcity. The best sources of information were schools and libraries. But with ubiquitous interconnectivity, knowledge became a free commodity—like air or water—available on every Internet-connected device. You no longer needed a teacher or librarian to provide you access.

Digital Bank: Strategies for Launching or Becoming a Digital Bank
by Chris Skinner
Published 27 Aug 2013

It goes further than this however, as PFM combined with mobile provides real-time financial analytics and management for every individual and company being serviced by the bank. Real-time and personal Another game changer for banking is real-time payments and real-time services. Mobile money in real-time changes the game and here’s how. Roll back a few decades to the pre-internet age. This was the age of the first screen: the television. You would only get to notice things through the screen in the lounge, and that would be a screaming advert. You could get reactivity by going to the branch and talking to the bank, based on the screaming advert gaining your attention. Then we entered the second age of the screen: the desktop.

E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation
by David Bodanis
Published 25 May 2009

There are also insights from William Blake, samples of Einstein’s voice, links to the courses I offer on the equation, a look at why simple art forms such as equations are so often true, and other odds and ends. The newly finished British Library was an excellent place to research all this: It’s one of the great libraries of acknowledgments the world, and possibly the last, pyramid-like homage to the pre-Internet era. Many of the Library’s science journals were still in the old Southampton Row reading rooms, where interior design and coffee facilities were not quite at the same level, but the photostats of original patent applications on the wall (Whittle’s jet engine, the paperclip, the thermos flask, the Wright brothers’ wing-warping) made up for a lot of that.

Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High
by Mike Power
Published 1 May 2013

But, for all his infectious charm as he chats and jokes in pithy English in his office in an upmarket Shanghai apartment block, there is a sinister side to the business that has made this chemistry graduate conspicuously wealthy aged 35.5 Sipping on a Red Bull – his only vice – the chemist said to Parry, ‘I have no time for holidays … I have a lot of business on my hands. I need all the energy I can get.’ Uncle Fester, aka Steve Preisler, one of the USA’s methamphetamine pioneers and the original narcotic folk devil of the pre-internet age, has kept up on developments in the trade, and says Chinese outsourcing was a logical step for US-based drug manufacturers. ‘The cooking of the materials has been outsourced to China because it is impossible to do it here,’ he told me by email. He continued: These materials are too complicated to be cooked up by a basement chemist and they require access to precursors unavailable to US-based cooks … Even if it might be quasi-legal, the cops would just simply be crawling all over them, and if nothing else putting them in jail for violations of hazardous waste laws or [health and safety] violations in their shop.

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
by Dan Lyons
Published 4 Apr 2016

Foreign workers are “easy to intimidate because if they lose their jobs they have to leave the U.S.,” Reich says. Why are tech companies so obsessed with cutting costs? Look at their financial results. Many don’t make a profit. The biggest difference between today’s tech start-ups and those of the pre-Internet era is that the old guard companies, like Microsoft and Lotus Development, generated massive profits almost from the beginning, while today many tech companies lose enormous amounts of money for years on end, even after they go public. They need to constantly drive costs down, using things like Halligan’s VORP metric.

How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong
by Elizabeth Day
Published 3 Apr 2019

I would stutter at the Sunday lunch table, looking at a roast joint served up with potatoes and a jar of mint sauce. After a while, my parents started giving the sheep numbers so that I became less emotionally attached to them. I’m not sure it worked. To this day, I far prefer roast chicken. Since this was the pre-internet, pre-Netflix era, when we weren’t herding sheep, my sister and I had to make our own entertainment. My idea of a good time was disappearing into the vast network of rhododendron bushes in our garden to read a Nancy Drew mystery or playing by the River Faughan which ran parallel to our house and which when uttered in a Northern Irish accent, sounded like an expletive.

JPod
by Douglas Coupland
Published 30 Apr 2007

I don't know why I work here in hell at Staples and not someplace else. Bethany here is confronting me on this issue and I don't know what to say. I've had so many real-world jobs—in offices where people have their own parking spaces and where biweekly meetings are held, and where they have Christmas parties. I drank my way out of all of them. Pre-Internet I could get away with it. These days if you type LUSH into Google, I'm the first hit. Fucking Internet. I can't even move to someplace remote where they still speak English, like Tasmania or South Africa. They'll know my dirt. They. So until I figure out an escape clause, it's Staples for me.

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy
by Nathan Schneider
Published 10 Sep 2018

What if, rather than just indicating on Facebook that you plan to participate in a protest, you joined a group of people contractually bound to do so? Could smart contracts bring back solidarity? It was a statement of digital possibilities but also, intentionally or not, a testament to what the digital world had lost. Waldman cited such pre-internet curiosities as in-person meetings, distinctive clothing, even religious belief—“a powerful engineering tool, and we should take it seriously.” He talked about orders such as the Freemasons and Elks in the past tense, as sources of inspiration for the DAOs to come. But three-fourths of the way through his talk, one of the engineers present—middle-aged, with a thick beard and large glasses—raised his hand and declared himself a real-life Freemason.

Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America's Eyeballs
by Gina Keating
Published 10 Oct 2012

Cooper’s father had owned a small video-rental chain in Lafayette, Louisiana, and Cooper himself had grown up behind the counters of those stores—serving customers, listening to their opinions, observing the stores’ demand patterns, developing an intuition for how the business worked and made money. He worked at a Blockbuster store in high school, in the pre-Internet era when the clerks were mostly movie geeks who regarded the VHS screeners the stores received as the job’s main perk. Unlike Evangelist and Antioco, Cooper was comfortable with the technology underpinning the user interface that Blockbuster Online needed to build. He was not intimidated by Netflix’s advantage in development time and subscribers, but he realized that its attention to detail and the recommendation engine would be difficult to replicate with the time and budget allotted to build their service.

The Burning Land
by George Alagiah
Published 28 Aug 2019

He read the letter through and explained that the insurance company no longer wanted to send monthly statements by post automatically. It would be done online, unless customers expressly asked to stay on the postal system. He imagined some bright young thing coming up with the plan, oblivious to the pre-internet generation for whom this particular product had been designed. Maude sighed with relief, her mind put at rest by his confident assurances. That matter concluded, Maude had a number of chores for Kagiso. Every time he finished one she seemed to have another waiting. He wondered if she was inventing them as she went along – a mother’s ploy to keep her beloved son close to her, even if only for a few more minutes.

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer
by Duncan J. Watts
Published 28 Mar 2011

Answering it, however, required us to track the diffusion of more than 70 million URLs over the entire Twitter network for a two-month period. Prior to social networking services like Twitter and Facebook, which, remember, are just a few years old, that level of scale and resolution would have been impossible.14 Other experiments that I have described, like the Small World experiment from Chapter 4, were certainly possible in the pre-Internet era, but not on the scale at which they can now be conducted. Milgram’s original experiment, for example, used physical letters and relied on just three hundred individuals attempting to reach a single person in Boston. The e-mail–based experiment that my colleagues and I conducted back in 2002 involved more than sixty thousand people directing messages to one of eighteen targets, who in turn were located in thirteen countries.

Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes
by Maria Konnikova
Published 3 Jan 2013

(Actually, draco sumatranus, a gliding lizard native to Indonesia—but would anyone in England during Conan Doyle’s time have been so wise?) Or this. A creature of the deep, dark imagination, something out of a book of horrors, perhaps. But real? (Actually, the star-nosed mole, condylura cristata, is found in eastern Canada. Hardly common knowledge even in the pre-Internet days, let alone back in the Victorian era.) Or indeed any number of animals that had seemed foreign and strange only decades earlier—and some that seem strange even today. Would they have been held to the same burden of proof—or would the lack of obvious fakery in the photograph have been enough?

My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance
by Emanuel Derman
Published 1 Jan 2004

I was excited to see what came next. Meanwhile, back in Philadelphia, Lay Nam and John continued on their related but independent work. We had no email or ten-cent-perminute telephone calls to link us. Collaboration across the Atlantic was cost-prohibitive and communication was viscous in those pre-Internet days. Not only did we think it unrealistic to telephone to discuss research, but even airmail postage and xeroxing were expensive. The Department of Theoretical Physics at Oxford, itself on a limited budget, restricted each of its postdocs to 40 free photocopies a month. After that we paid for copies of articles we wanted.

Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War
by James Risen
Published 15 Feb 2014

Roark insisted on briefings from Trailblazer managers and came away convinced that the program was doomed to become a costly failure. “Trailblazer was supposed to build an Internet software-based system on top of an analog hardware system, and it just wasn’t going to work,” she recalled. “They had always felt comfortable with their existing systems. They wanted to use pre-Internet technology for the Internet age. I told them right away that would fail. It was just common sense.” (Roark proved prescient. Years later, the NSA abandoned Trailblazer. After spending billions of dollars on the program’s development, the agency was finally forced to admit that it would not work.)

What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves
by Benjamin K. Bergen
Published 12 Sep 2016

For instance, we know that ctfu (“cracking the fuck up”) spread mostly from Cleveland to a number of other mid-Atlantic cities, as you can see in the figure on the next page.15 And we know this because people leave quantifiable records of their language use in the form of GPS-coded tweets. But we have no such luxury for changes that occurred in the deep history of English—pre-Internet. So we know little about exactly how cock’s new meaning spread throughout the English-speaking world starting in the fifteenth century. But we do know what niche it filled. Every language has a way to describe human sexual organs. They’re pretty important, culturally, biologically, personally.

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story
by Michael Lewis
Published 29 Sep 1999

He put it down, then picked it up again, as if starting in on it fresh might somehow alter its meaning. In that hour Long did not speak or change expression. He was a man in a trance. The article about Healtheon that appeared on the front page of the Page 183 Wall Street Journal on October 2, 1998, was a rocket from pre-Internet America. It quoted industry experts saying things like "a lot of the challenges we face in health care have very little to do with the Internet." It pointed out that Pavan and his team of engineers were late delivering Healtheon's software to doctors, and left it to the reader to surmise that this just might be because the software did not work.

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 3 Feb 2015

Certainly, when Eric and I started on our investor recruitment mission, we already had a network in place that gave us access to investors like Branson and Page. This is not going to be the case for everyone. But that doesn’t mean all is lost. In fact, my entire thinking about the line of super-credibility dates back to a time in my life when I had little credibility, when I was a college student—in the pre-Internet, pre-Google, pre-Facebook days—with access to few beyond friends and family. This story starts in 1980, during my sophomore year at MIT, when I founded Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS).10 SEDS emerged from my passion to open the space frontier and my frustration—already mentioned—with NASA.

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Feb 2018

Answers to that question lie in reflecting on how we went from the utopian concept of a level-playing-field Internet that led New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to declare that the “world is flat” to one in which a handful of gargantuan gatekeepers have asserted almost total control. Let’s start with the pre-Internet offline economy, the one we inherited from the twentieth century, when the centralized trust model was the only one we could imagine. Under that system, which prevails to this day, we charge banks, public utilities, certificate authorities, government agencies, and countless other centralized entities and institutions with the task of recording everyone’s transactions and exchanges of value.

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society
by Eric Posner and E. Weyl
Published 14 May 2018

These designs used two-way links where every piece of information would effectively carry its full provenance with it.6 At various points in the development of the web, governments and companies made attempts to direct revenue to the diffused set of individuals who contributed value to the system. In France, the pre-Internet Minitel system had a system of micropayments,7 for example, and the America OnLine (AOL) service popular in the 1990s in the United States charged its customers a fee and used the revenue to pay for content it made available within its simplified “walled garden” interface. For a period, some Internet designers were trying to force email to carry postage stamps as a way to deter spammers from flooding inboxes with junk.

WEconomy: You Can Find Meaning, Make a Living, and Change the World
by Craig Kielburger , Holly Branson , Marc Kielburger , Sir Richard Branson and Sheryl Sandberg
Published 7 Mar 2018

We met in Islamabad, and after a 15-minute conversation with the Prime Minister, he promised to raise the issue of child labor with the business delegation traveling with him, in addition to the President of Pakistan. For clips of the press conference and a glimpse of my meeting with the Prime Minister: Click for video When I returned home, a crush of journalists waited at the airport. 60 Minutes trailed me through my high-school cafeteria. Like a scene out of an old (pre-Internet) movie, the mail carrier delivered bags overflowing with letters of encouragement, and messages from other children who wanted to join this organization. Single dollar bills from allowance and birthday money were sent by kids who wanted to help. We soon had raised enough money to build a rehabilitation center for freed child slaves, along with 22 primary schools, in Asia.

Amazon: How the World’s Most Relentless Retailer Will Continue to Revolutionize Commerce
by Natalie Berg and Miya Knights
Published 28 Jan 2019

The more that connectivity becomes truly ubiquitous, with the development of fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks, alongside blanket Wi-Fi availability, wireless charging, and whatever device or means that enable us to be always connected and online at faster speeds, the more impatient we become for greater choice, more intuitive search and instantaneous response and fulfilment times. The context for the second technology driver, towards more ‘pervasive interfaces’, requires that we go back to the early, pre-internet days of computing, where the idea of a handheld pointing device or ‘mouse’ was relatively new. For example, in 1984, reporter Gregg Williams wrote of the introduction of the first Macintosh computer that it ‘brings us one step closer to the ideal computer as appliance’. ‘The Lisa computer was important because it was the first commercial product to use the mouse-window-desktop environment.

Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life
by Alan B. Krueger
Published 3 Jun 2019

This is the foundation of copyright and patent law. By establishing a limited property right—the legal authority to exclude others from using a creative work for a period of time—copyright law seeks to strike a balance between the interests of creators and the interests of consumers.8 And while in pre-Internet days one could plausibly argue that bringing a new book or song to market first provided protection against copiers and imitators—as a young Stephen Breyer once argued before he was named to the Supreme Court—that argument clearly does not hold water in the digital era, when perfect copies can be made and distributed throughout the world almost instantaneously.

IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives
by Chris Stedman
Published 19 Oct 2020

Just as movements can grow swiftly online, as an untrained cartographer I can quickly make my own map of my city without input from anyone else. Both might bring fresh perspectives, and, as Tufekci says, there is real value there. But she offers an important caveat. “The tedious work performed during the pre-internet era served other purposes as well,” she writes. “Perhaps most importantly, it acclimated people to the process of collective decision making and helped create the resilience all movements need to survive and thrive in the long term.” In some respects we once publicly mapped our lives in more collaborative ways.

European Founders at Work
by Pedro Gairifo Santos
Published 7 Nov 2011

In 1998, the first virus that piggybacked on e-mail was released, which was called Melissa. And basically the virus problem changed overnight. Once viruses learned to piggyback on e-mail, the problem became much more significant because viruses could spread really rapidly. Traditional antivirus software was designed in a pre-internet kind of world. You downloaded the software, and every week or every month you downloaded new updates that protected you against a new threat. But it's very slow and reactive in nature. So, we thought that maybe we could build an antivirus system within the fabric of the internet where we could recognize new viruses without needing an update, without needing an exact match, by developing a knowledge base of virus techniques and behavior.

The Industries of the Future
by Alec Ross
Published 2 Feb 2016

Her job largely consisted of rummaging through enormous 15-pound books looking for specific information on old court cases and real estate closings. The books were so heavy and the stacks so high that my mom used to conscript me and my little brother to help her. Even as an unemployed high school student in the pre-Internet world when few people owned a home computer, I remember thinking that a computer should be able to do this job more efficiently. But my mom said, “If that ever happens, I won’t have a job.” Today my mom’s job is largely computerized. I now think the same thing about my dad, an attorney who’s still working at age 77 with a storefront legal practice just off Main Street in Hurricane, West Virginia.

An Optimist's Tour of the Future
by Mark Stevenson
Published 4 Dec 2010

The Internet/Web provides a platform to bridge that gap. Individuals across the world are able to form groups much more quickly and powerfully than at any time in history. Protest movements can achieve the critical mass needed to have their voice heard in a way that simply wasn’t possible in a pre-Internet age. (Iraq war demonstrations used the power of the Internet to mobilise millions of demonstrators across the globe.) In between are groups of enthusiasts who collectively craft Wikipedia entries for the benefit of us all, or develop ‘open source’ software tools, or form online communities. A nice example is The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers, who shot to fame in 2009 as an Internet phenomenon, going on to perform at the Oscars.

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
by John Brockman
Published 14 Feb 2012

Human beings are impossibly complex tarballs of muscle, blood, bone, breath, and electrical pulses that travel through nerves and neurons; we are bundles of electrical pulses carrying payloads, pings hitting servers. And our identities are inextricably connected to our environments: No story can be told without a setting. My generation is the last generation of human beings who were born into a pre-Internet world but who matured in tandem with that great networked hive-mind. In the course of my work online, committing new memories to network mind each day, I have come to understand that our shared memory of events, truths, biography, and fact—all of this shifts and ebbs and flows, just as our most personal memories do.

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 1 Jan 2007

To get an accurate indicator of commercial viability, don’t ask people if they would buy—ask them to buy. The response to the second is the only one that matters. The approach of the NR reflects this. Step Three: Micro-Test Your Products Micro-testing involves using inexpensive advertisements to test consumer response to a product prior to manufacturing.40 In the pre-Internet era, this was done using small classified ads in newspapers or magazines that led prospects to call a prerecorded sales message. Prospects would leave their contact information, and based on the number of callers or response to a follow-up sales letter, the product would be abandoned or manufactured.

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
by Howard Rheingold
Published 24 Dec 2011

Tonga, Mongolia, the Rez, and Wales: The New Electronic Frontiers Colonel Dave Hughes, USA, Ret., is the only character who has popped up in the plot every time I’ve investigated the roots of a technology revolution. In 1983, exploring the brave new world of the 300 bit per second modem, I encountered him on the Source, a pre-Internet online meeting place. A West Point graduate who had commanded combat troops in Korea and Vietnam, Hughes retired to Colorado and became fired up about the democratic potential of personal computers and modems.49 In 1992, when I was documenting the world of virtual communities, I learned that Hughes was introducing the Internet to Indian reservations and the Big Sky Telegraph system in rural Montana, so I made a pilgrimage to Hughes’s Internet-equipped booth in Rogers’ Bar in Old Colorado City to interview him.50 I have seen Dave Hughes a dozen times, and I’ve never seen him without his Stetson.

Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever
by Robin Wigglesworth
Published 11 Oct 2021

Moreover, the damning research indicated that there was “very little evidence that any individual fund was able to do significantly better than that which we expected from mere random chance.”31 This hardly trickled into the offices of the rapidly growing mutual fund industry. After all, the tribe of swaggering star money managers that had emerged in the 1960s bull market had little time for the idle pontification of academics in their ivory towers—if they were even aware of it. In the pre-internet era, information traveled slowly, and unwelcome information was easier to ignore. Fund managers like Fidelity’s Gerald Tsai could point to eye-watering returns from investing in hot “Nifty Fifty” stocks, but as mad as it might sound today, most investors didn’t ask for and fund managers didn’t provide relative performance data.32 And the idea that someone could do well by just buying the entire market was considered preposterous.

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
by David Epstein
Published 1 Mar 2019

New collaborations allow creators “to take ideas that are conventions in one area and bring them into a new area, where they’re suddenly seen as invention,” said sociologist Brian Uzzi, Amaral’s collaborator. Human creativity, he said, is basically an “import/export business of ideas.” Uzzi documented an import/export trend that began in both the physical and social sciences in the 1970s, pre-internet: more successful teams tended to have more far-flung members. Teams that included members from different institutions were more likely to be successful than those that did not, and teams that included members based in different countries had an advantage as well. Consistent with the import/export model, scientists who have worked abroad—whether or not they returned—are more likely to make a greater scientific impact than those who have not.

The Man Who Was Saturday
by Patrick Bishop
Published 21 Jan 2019

“That fucker Neave – he said there was no chance of her winning!”’ Neave used the same technique when engaging in a clever piece of media manipulation. According to Richard Ryder, the night before the poll he spoke to Bob Carvel, political editor of the Evening Standard, an important publication in the pre-internet age, when its early editions could set the news agenda. He told the reporter that Heath’s figures were higher than his own canvass suggested. The story was carried in the first edition, which appeared before lunch, and Neave arranged for extra copies to be distributed around the Commons facilities.

Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War
by Fred Kaplan
Published 1 Mar 2016

A hacker friend had told them about “demon-dialing” (also called “war-dialing”), in which a telephone modem searched for other nearby modems by automatically dialing each phone number in a local area code and letting it ring twice before moving on to the next number. If a modem answered, it would squawk; the demon-dialing software would record that number, and the hacker would call it back later. (This was the way that early computer geeks found one another: a pre-Internet form of web trolling.) In the screenplay, this was how their whiz-kid hero breaks into the NORAD computer. But Lasker and Parkes wondered whether this was possible: wouldn’t a military computer be closed off to public phone lines? Lasker lived in Santa Monica, a few blocks from RAND. Figuring that someone there might be helpful, he called the public affairs officer, who put him in touch with Ware, who invited the pair to his office.

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers
by Andy Greenberg
Published 5 Nov 2019

Instead, he locked himself in his basement-level apartment in the D.C. neighborhood of Capitol Hill. For the next three weeks, he barely left that four-hundred-square-foot box, instead working on his laptop from a folding chair, with his back to the only window in his home that produced sunlight, poring over every data point that might reveal the next cluster of the hackers’ targets. A pre-internet-era detective might start a rudimentary search for a person by consulting phone books. Matonis started digging into the online equivalent, the directory of the web’s global network known as the domain name system, or DNS. DNS servers translate human-readable domains like “facebook.com” into the machine-readable IP addresses that actually describe the location of a networked computer that runs that site or service, like 69.63.176.13.

The Accidental Investment Banker: Inside the Decade That Transformed Wall Street
by Jonathan A. Knee
Published 31 Jul 2006

Goldman would ultimately pay over $250 million to settle charges related to Maxwell’s looting of his employees’ pensions. But by the time I had arrived, Goldman was established as a serious U.K. presence, particularly in the lucrative area of M&A. Equally striking for me was the institutionalization of the “production process” involved in all aspects of investment banking. Though this was the pre-Internet era, our computer screens seamlessly integrated key third-party information on any company—everything from current news and public filings to deal databases that showed what deals the company had done and who had advised them—with proprietary internal Goldman Sachs information such as the history of the relationship, key contacts at the company, and deal team members within different parts of the firm.

Permanent Record
by Edward Snowden
Published 16 Sep 2019

You can’t really appreciate how hard it is to stay anonymous online until you’ve tried to operate as if your life depended on it. Most of the communications systems set up in the IC have a single basic aim: the observer of a communication must not be able to discern the identities of those involved, or in any way attribute them to an agency. This is why the IC calls these exchanges “non-attributable.” The pre-Internet spycraft of anonymity is famous, mostly from TV and the movies: a safe-house address coded in bathroom-stall graffiti, for instance, or scrambled into the abbreviations of a classified ad. Or think of the Cold War’s “dead drops,” the chalk marks on mailboxes signaling that a secret package was waiting inside a particular hollowed-out tree in a public park.

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics
by Peter Geoghegan
Published 2 Jan 2020

“The Conservatives really pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable, and they did it on digital media.” It isn’t supposed to be like this. As we have seen, Britain has lots of regulations governing its politics, including restrictive spending limits and campaign finance transparency requirements. But these rules are designed for a pre-Internet age. Campaigns commit vastly increased resources online, but understanding what exactly they are doing has become ever harder. It’s not just adverts on Facebook. There’s Instagram and WhatsApp (both owned by Facebook), as well as Google, Snapchat and a growing array of closed messaging platforms.

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You
by Sangeet Paul Choudary , Marshall W. van Alstyne and Geoffrey G. Parker
Published 27 Mar 2016

And this is not impossible—but in the real world, it doesn’t always produce lasting economic returns. A classic illustration is the so-called VCR war of the 1970s and 1980s, which pitted two technology platforms against each other: the Betamax videotape standard sponsored by Sony, and the VHS standard sponsored by JVC. Unlike most platforms of today, these standards from the pre-Internet era did not create an online venue in which producers and consumers could meet to conduct interactions together. However, they qualified as platforms because they established technology systems that would allow multiple producers (chiefly movie and TV studios) to sell products to consumers. Thus, they faced many of the same kinds of strategic challenges that today’s Internet-based platforms must confront.

Digging Up Mother: A Love Story
by Doug Stanhope
Published 9 May 2016

I soon found out that generally only for the first few of the checks would they actually have the money in the bank to cover. So when pay-day came, it was a gumball rally to be first to the nearest bank to cash it. If you were too late and there were insufficient funds, then you had to endure the process of finding a check-cashing place that didn’t have this company on file as deadbeats. Those pre-Internet days where everything was done on index cards in a Rolodex were golden when it came to scamming the system. I was there for less than a month before they shut down and fled but there were plenty more in town, and if one shut down, you’d have a job at another by the end of the day. Some were really shaky, some almost felt corporate.

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World
by Pedro Domingos
Published 21 Sep 2015

With Google’s annual revenue of $50 billion, every 1 percent improvement in click prediction potentially means another half billion dollars in the bank, every year, for the company. No wonder Google is a big fan of machine learning, and Yahoo and others are trying hard to catch up. Web advertising is just one manifestation of a much larger phenomenon. In every market, producers and consumers need to connect before a transaction can happen. In pre-Internet days, the main obstacles to this were physical. You could only buy books from your local bookstore, and your local bookstore had limited shelf space. But when you can download any book to your e-reader any time, the problem becomes the overwhelming number of choices. How do you browse the shelves of a bookstore that has millions of titles for sale?

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution
by Pieter Hintjens
Published 11 Mar 2013

Communities and Social Networks Since the earliest bulletin board systems, humans have been drawn to join and hang out in on-line communities. Since its birth, the Internet has offered a rich world of special interest groups. Whatever your passion, the Internet provides hundreds, even millions, of people who share it, right at your fingertips. Pre-Internet commercial networks like Compuserve and AOL essentially sold "community" as their main product, and today this drives big sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube. Business Even though the Internet opened to commercial use only in the early 1990's, it's become an essential tool for all industries.

Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet
by Charles Arthur
Published 3 Mar 2012

Indeed, search engines seemed to contain an inherent contradiction: if you did it well, people would leave your site to go to the destination you’d served up – and, given the nature of search, that destination almost certainly wouldn’t be a site you controlled (unless you tweaked the results, in which case you risked dissatisfying the user); there are more pages on the internet that aren’t Yahoo.com or MSN.com or Askjeeves.com than those that are. That meant successful search engines lost the chance to serve up an advert. In pre-internet business terms, that’s bad business. Yet that’s not how the internet always functions. Yang’s 1996 decision to reject Google was predicated on the idea that people wouldn’t seek out better solutions to their problems online. And it ignored the idea that you create customer loyalty by giving them the best experience possible and that, if people found what they wanted through one search engine and not on another, they’d probably keep coming back to the first and ignore the second.

The Case Against Sugar
by Gary Taubes
Published 27 Dec 2016

But he nonetheless strongly “disapprove[d] [of] things preserv’d, or very much season’d with Sugar…[and judged] the invention of it, and its immoderate use to have very much contributed to the vast increase of Scurvy in this late Age.” Willis’s denunciation of sugar led in turn to its censure by the botanist John Ray, which could “frighten the Credulous,” as the physician Fred Slare noted in 1715, forty years later. (Scientific debates moved far more slowly in the pre-Internet era.) It was Slare’s vigorous defense of sugar—his “Vindication of Sugars Against the Charge of Dr. Willis, Other Physicians, and Common Prejudices”—that would once again capture perfectly the dilemma posed by sugar and the framing of the debates to come. To “defraud” infants of sugar “is a very cruel Thing, if not a crying Sin,” Slare wrote, before discussing the anecdotal experience of those, like his grandfather, who lived to be a hundred, and the duke of Beaufort, who died at seventy-one, both of whom ate excessive sugar by the standards of the era (Beaufort, apparently, for any era—a pound daily for forty years).*2 Slare also recounted his own experience as edifying: he was “near Sixty-seven” and in excellent health, he wrote, while indulging in large quantities of sugar.

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory
by Kariappa Bheemaiah
Published 26 Feb 2017

(Friedman and Schwartz, 1987) Ultimately, when thinking about changing currency issuance and using different monies, it is not a question of how value is transferred. It is a question of how trust is replaced. One digital money to rule them all—Fiscal Policy instead of Monetary Policy? The Blockchain highlights the fact that the existing structures of money creation and policy making parameters were built for a pre-Internet world. As the world moves into a cashless environment , it requires policies that are adapted to it. But the changes to be made are not just with regards to the technical underpinnings of monetary design. In light of prolonged low interest rates, soaring debt levels, high deficits, and weak economic growth, what is also required is a rethinking of how we understand money and macroeconomic policies, and if moving to a completely cashless economy can help us address these issues.

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
by Christopher Caldwell
Published 21 Jan 2020

But, like the bankers he went after, Spitzer took advantage of the ambiguity about what’s legal and what’s not that always arises when a society moves from one technological platform to another. There were a lot of emails lying around in companies’ private servers and those of internet service providers. The simplest way to treat them was as private and personal. Most users of the internet in its first decade assumed that the rules of privacy from the old pre-internet world would “map” commonsensically onto the new one. A gentleman didn’t read others’ emails, any more than his grandfather would have read people’s letters. The Fourth Amendment, which protects against illegal searches and seizures, would operate in cyberspace by some kind of analogy. But there was another way of looking at things: In sending emails, which passed through the private hands of various data processors and wound up stored on a supercomputer in some sparsely inhabited state, the sender had given custody of them to other private parties and had thereby forfeited his legal right to privacy.

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News
by Eric Berkowitz
Published 3 May 2021

Some platforms, like Facebook, make it possible for third parties to exploit users almost at will, sometimes to the point of manipulation.”51 Once users are done posting, the platforms track them, recording and monetizing the stories they read and share, the sites they visit, and countless other details. “What concerns me,” says law professor Kyle Langvardt, “is that we entrust a few unaccountable and self-interested tech companies to govern online discourse. It seems obvious . . . that this is an unacceptable way for a liberal society to do business.”52 The pre-Internet rules against censorship evolved roughly along a dual axis, on which the interests of speakers and governments were balanced against each other. Today’s censorship issues are multidimensional, involving not only these two sets of players but also the Internet companies and social media platforms that broker online speech, each pursuing its own imperatives.

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex
by Rupert Darwall
Published 2 Oct 2017

“An informed citizenry depends on people’s exposure to information on important political issues and on their willingness to discuss these issues with those around them,” Pew explained.3 If people thought friends and followers on social media disagreed with them, they were less likely to share their views, the survey showed. “It has long been established that when people are surrounded by those who are likely to disagree with their opinion, they are more likely to self-censor.”4 These findings confirmed a major insight of pre–internet era communication studies: the tendency of people not to voice their opinions when they sense their view is not widely shared. The report’s authors, led by Keith Hampton of Rutgers University, wrote, “This tendency is called the ‘spiral of silence.’”5 The Spiral of Silence, published in 1984, was written by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, West Germany’s foremost pollster.

Raising Cubby: A Father and Son's Adventures With Asperger's, Trains, Tractors, and High Explosives
by John Elder Robison
Published 12 Mar 2013

“If you want a late-model Mercedes,” I told people, “I’ll go to the Mercedes-Benz auction and find the one that’s perfect for you. You pay me a six-percent commission, just like a real estate agent. I’ll buy you a better car than you’d find at any dealer, for a better price. You’re hiring me to be your expert.” In those pre-Internet days my idea took off. Soon I was buying five, ten, and even twenty cars a month. I wasn’t worried about finding buyers for my inventory, because everything I bought was presold. Customers loved the transparency of my system. If I paid ten thousand for a car, they paid me ten thousand six hundred.

Chasing the Devil: On Foot Through Africa's Killing Fields
by Tim Butcher
Published 1 Apr 2011

This was one of the great jobs in British newspapers, a role so exciting it made egotistical, ambitious individuals, like me, sign up to be reporters, but for some reason Silk had walked away from it. The answer was linked to Liberia. One night shift he mentioned that he had covered the 1980 coup but gave scant other details. So down I went to the newspaper’s cuttings library to find out more. In those pre-internet days, the work of every reporter was routinely preserved in hard copy. Librarians would carefully cut out and file every piece of work printed by the newspaper under an individual’s by-line. I went through the filing cabinets and found the folder marked ‘Silk, Brian’. It was empty. Years before he had broken the rules by destroying all his own cuttings.

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries
by Safi Bahcall
Published 19 Mar 2019

They ended up at the University of Texas, published their first paper together in 1973, and have published over five hundred papers together in the past forty years (alternating the order of their names on each, from “Brown-Goldstein” to “Goldstein-Brown”). They have been called the Gilbert and Sullivan of medicine. After Brown and Goldstein arrived in Texas, they subscribed to a computer-based service that alerted them to published articles citing their work (not uncommon in the pre-internet era). In July 1976, the service notified them that one Akira Endo in Tokyo had published an article in a Japanese scientific journal reviewing the results from one of their papers. They couldn’t read the Japanese words, but they recognized the figures from their paper. They were delighted that their work had crossed overseas and added Endo to their author screen.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale
Published 14 May 2020

Artificial intelligence will remain artificial because it will always be a product constructed out of human cooperation.15 Moreover, most recent advances in AI are designed to perform specific tasks rather than to take on entire jobs or social roles.16 There are many examples of technologies that make jobs more productive, more rewarding, or both. As the Agency for Digital Italy has observed, “Technology often does not completely replace a professional figure but replaces only some specific activities.”17 Contemporary law students can barely believe that pre-internet lawyers had to comb through dusty tomes to assess the validity of a case; research software makes that process easier and vastly expands the range of resources available for an argument. Far from simplifying matters, it may make them much more complex.18 Spending less time hunting down books and more time doing the intellectual work of synthesizing cases is a net plus for attorneys.

The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can't See
by Gary Price , Chris Sherman and Danny Sullivan
Published 2 Jan 2003

Brian tells Toni about the Advanced Book Exchange (http://www.abebooks.com). Within a few seconds after entering the title and author information and clicking the search button, Toni has a list of ten used book dealers who can ship her the book overnight. In 15 hours the book is in her hands. In pre-Internet days, finding an out of print or rare book was often very time consuming and expensive, if not flat-out impossible. Generalpurpose search tools could, in theory, help someone like Toni locate a dealer who has a copy of an out of print book for sale. In reality, however, search engines prefer not to index the catalogs of online retailers.

The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution
by Marc Weingarten
Published 12 Dec 2006

The work of the New Journalists was distinctly of its time, but it hasn’t lost its shock of the new; the collections of Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, and the others still shore up the backlists of their publishers quite nicely. This was a great time for magazines and newspapers, after all, a precable, pre-Internet era when the print media reigned supreme among educated and culturally savvy readers. Esquire, Rolling Stone, New York— the readers of these publications could barely afford to miss an issue, lest they miss out on something. And a new generation of writers was reading as well. The greatest work of New Journalism’s golden era—the last, great good time of American journalism, which roughly spans the years 1962 to 1977—left a profound impression on what Robert Boynton has called the “New New Journalists,” who learned the best lessons of their elders and carry on the tradition today.

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson
Published 26 Jun 2017

Libraries are founded and funded by monarchs, churches, democratically elected governments, and philanthropists, and they are typically staffed by trained professionals who select, arrange, and maintain their collections. They’re a great example of what we call the “core,” which we define as the dominant organizations, institutions, groups, and processes of the pre-Internet era. To be clear up front, we don’t think the core is bad or obsolete. Both of us have used and have benefited from libraries all our lives, and we take a geeky pride in MIT’s excellent library system. What Wright foresaw, even if he couldn’t have anticipated its size and speed, was the emergence of an alternative to the core, which we call the “crowd” and define as the new participants and practices enabled by the net and its attendant technologies.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
by John Markoff
Published 24 Aug 2015

In 1949, the New York Times invited Wiener to summarize his views about “what the ultimate machine age is likely to be,” in the words of its longtime Sunday editor, Lester Markel. Wiener accepted the invitation and wrote a draft of the article; the legendarily autocratic Markel was dissatisfied and asked him to rewrite it. He did. But through a distinctly pre-Internet series of fumbles and missed opportunities, neither version ever appeared at the time. In August of 1949, according to Wiener’s papers at MIT, the Times asked him to resend the first draft of the article to be combined with the second draft. (It is unclear why the editors had misplaced the first draft.)

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know
by P. W. Singer and Allan Friedman
Published 3 Jan 2014

We tried to gather all the key questions that people had about this field, not only those asked by people working in politics or technology, but also from our interactions and interviews well beyond. This set of questions was backed by what would have previously been called a “literature survey.” In the old (pre-Internet) days, this meant going to the library and pulling off the shelf all the books in that section of the Dewey decimal system. Today, on this topic especially, the sources range from books to online journals to microblogs. We were also greatly aided by a series of workshops and seminars at Brookings, the think tank in Washington we work at.

Who Owns the Future?
by Jaron Lanier
Published 6 May 2013

Reversible computers don’t radiate as much heat; forgetting radiates randomness, which is the same thing as heating up the neighborhood. There is a fundamental problem with transposing that plan to economics: A marketplace is a system of competing players, each of whom would ideally be working from a different, but not an a priori better or worse, information position. In a pre-Internet market, it would sometimes be the case that small local players could conjure an informational advantage over big players.† †This book can only present one point of view in a field with many interesting points of view. For foundational ideas about differing access to information in a marketplace, I direct readers to the work of the 2001 winners of Nobel Prize in Economics, who each addressed this topic in a different way: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2001/press.html.

Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay
by Jonathan Shapiro and James Eyers
Published 2 Aug 2021

In April 2016, as Eisen, Molnar and Harris were doing the rounds with prospective investors, logistics software firm WiseTech Global went public, with shares priced to value the business at $1 billion. There was nothing new or sexy about WiseTech, which was formed all the way back in 1994, when VHS had triumphed over Betamax. It had built a system to monitor supply chains and logistics. Its founder, Richard White, was a creature of the pre-internet technology era. He used to repair guitars for rock band AC/DC. The company also made money, which was so unusual among tech firms that it could be said to be unfashionable. WiseTech was forecasting a $25 million profit over the next twelve months. But WiseTech’s management was aware of what the market really wanted: revenue growth.

The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers
by Richard McGregor
Published 8 Jun 2010

‘Things have changed now, but it was pretty clear that back then the Party was the grand puppeteer for everything that happened in every section of society, and the company. The only force was vertically driven decision making.’ The prospectus drawn up by Shanghai Petrochemical, with Merrill Lynch in Hong Kong and their legal and accounting advisers, was the size of a pre-internet-era telephone book. The document groaned with detail about the product lines, resource use, property holdings and the numbers of employees. The risks associated for a company, as an entity owned by the state, and operating in an environment buffeted by both market forces and powerful, capricious bureaucrats with control over energy prices, were laid out in full view.

Emotional Ignorance: Lost and Found in the Science of Emotion
by Dean Burnett
Published 10 Jan 2023

Studies and experiments have repeatedly demonstrated that what those around us think, believe, and do, directly influences what we think, believe, and do.104 The human brain is just that social. This means we’re strongly inclined to conform, to agree and go along with those around us, those we identify with. Indeed, recent research reveals that, even if they consciously want to, it’s genuinely very difficult for an individual to resist the compulsion to conform.105 Pre-internet, when the news and information we received about the world came via TV and newspapers, it meant everyone in a population was receiving roughly the same information from only a few sources, so there was a smaller range of likely beliefs and worldviews. In addition, there were regulations and checks and balances to stop newspapers and broadcasters saying whatever they wanted, to suit their own ends, or those of their owners.

Very Bad People: The Inside Story of the Fight Against the World’s Network of Corruption
by Patrick Alley
Published 17 Mar 2022

Two bore false names: mine was Chris Manners (the surname borrowed from old friends of the family) and Simon’s was Richard Sutton. If anyone phoned the number on the card, their call would be answered ‘Universal Export’ by Charmian in London. If they faxed us, nothing would happen because we didn’t have a fax machine. The cover was pretty thin, but it would serve. In those pre-internet days, there was no easy way for anyone to check our bona fides. We visited one of the only two spy shops we knew of in London – the cheaper one, which slumbered gently in seedy squalor in Kilburn, behind those blacked-out windows that you’d more likely associate with a massage parlour. The owner, a pallid and perspiring man with large, black-framed spectacles, guided us through various ingenious items of equipment beloved of private detectives whose main business was catching out unfaithful husbands and wives.

Red-Blooded Risk: The Secret History of Wall Street
by Aaron Brown and Eric Kim
Published 10 Oct 2011

Collecting other accounts and carefully cross-checking facts would produce a richer and more accurate story, but I don’t think it would give more insight about the nature of risk. Although we collaborated in a grand project, we didn’t know each other very well; in fact, we often didn’t know each other at all. We didn’t meet in seminar rooms or trading floors or restaurants, or in each other’s homes. Mostly we communicated by dial-up computer bulletin boards, a pre-Internet form of geek interaction. These were initially set up to share data, something we all needed and that was generally unavailable in electronic form. So whatever numbers you typed in by hand you uploaded for others, and thereby gained access to their labors. But the story does not begin in 1980.

The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography
by Stephen Fry
Published 27 Sep 2010

You know there is something amiss when a doctor can absolutely guarantee that if the roads are slippery a fatal accident will be sure to befall a despatch rider somewhere in the city and that a fresh, healthy pair of young eyes will soon be speeding their way to the operating theatre packed in a cool-box. A cool-box bungeed to the pillion of a motorcycle in all probability … Well, that was London in the pre-fax, pre-internet eighties. Couriers and cars did the work, and it was matter in the form of massy atoms, rather than content in the form of massless electrons, that had to be conveyed from place to place. But I was telling you about The Stinker. It was inevitable that sooner or later in my career as a literary critic I would open a courier’s package (ooer, now but shush) and find a book about which there could be nothing good to say.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
by Ashlee Vance
Published 18 May 2015

Musk’s opportunity to flee arrived with a change in the law that allowed Maye to pass her Canadian citizenship to her children. Musk immediately began researching how to complete the paperwork for this process. It took about a year to receive the approvals from the Canadian government and to secure a Canadian passport. “That’s when Elon said, ‘I’m leaving for Canada,’” Maye said. In these pre-Internet days, Musk had to wait three agonizing weeks to get a plane ticket. Once it arrived, and without flinching, he left home for good. 3 CANADA MUSK’S GREAT ESCAPE TO CANADA WAS NOT WELL THOUGHT OUT. He knew of a great-uncle in Montreal, hopped on a flight and hoped for the best. Upon landing in June 1988, Musk found a pay phone and tried to use directory assistance to find his uncle.

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics
by Richard H. Thaler
Published 10 May 2015

That morning, Miller could not be blamed if he was thinking that this good news for his mentor and collaborator was bad news for him. Modigliani won the prize alone, and Miller might have felt that he had missed his chance. It turned out that he would win a Nobel Prize five years later, but he had no way of knowing that at the time. Nor did he know that morning, in this pre-Internet era, that the prize had been awarded primarily for Modigliani’s work on saving and consumption—the life-cycle hypothesis—rather than for his work with Miller on corporate finance. In the morning festivities surrounding the news, Miller spoke briefly about Modigliani’s research. The press had asked him to summarize the work he had done with Modigliani, and, with his usual sharp wit, he said they had shown that if you take a ten-dollar bill from one pocket and put it into a different pocket, your wealth does not change.

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America
by Charlotte Alter
Published 18 Feb 2020

They remember what it was like before the internet: calling up friends on home phone lines, calling Moviefone to find movie times, fighting over CDs in the car. Of course, Gen Xers and boomers also remember the analog age—probably much better than millennials do—and many of them are just as digitally nimble even if they spent more of their adult lives in a pre-internet world. But one day, far in the future, millennials will be the last people on earth who remember what it was like before the internet changed everything. Being a kid in the 1980s meant getting a remote control for the first time, recording birthday parties on a camcorder, and trying to reach your parents on their pagers.

First Time Ever: A Memoir
by Peggy Seeger
Published 2 Oct 2017

I pointed out that I played the five-string banjo, the true subject of all those banjo jokes. Britain needed laughter. The Home Office didn’t laugh. Mid-May I went down to Dover and over to Boulogne. Anyone with a microgram of common sense would have waited a month and returned via Portsmouth – in those pre-internet days it would take weeks for Portsmouth to communicate with Dover. But no, two weeks later I returned via Dover. I was taken from Customs directly to the headquarters of the marine police. Unsaid: Private Britain was saluting General America. Said: I was to be sent back to Boulogne in the morning.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire
by Jeff Berwick and Charlie Robinson
Published 14 Apr 2020

It is easy to see it as a global marketplace, connecting people from all over the planet through its platform and storefront. An even better example of globalization is eBay, where sellers and buyers come together to conduct sales transactions with people that would probably never find each other pre-internet. This is one of the positive aspects of globalized trade because it allows people separated geographically to meet in one particular spot, on eBay’s cyber storefront, and find what they are looking to buy or sell something that is just taking up space in their garage. Having access to this global market has tremendous value, and for hundreds of years, the only real way to make these introductions were through shipping lanes and trading outposts.

Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism
by Jeffrey Toobin
Published 1 May 2023

There were the “militias” in various states, of course, but also the “Patriots,” the “Order,” and “Freemen.” They shared an agenda much like McVeigh’s—always centered on gun rights, but also featuring a free-floating hostility to the federal government and its supposed plans for a New World Order. In this pre-internet era, the individuals didn’t have many opportunities to meet and collaborate. They connected sporadically, and their alliances were built more on what they read and saw rather than what they could do together. Their members sometimes found each other at gun shows and read The Spotlight and Soldier of Fortune, but most operated semi-independently and came up with their own plans for action.

A First-Class Catastrophe: The Road to Black Monday, the Worst Day in Wall Street History
by Diana B. Henriques
Published 18 Sep 2017

Well before 1980, some bright thinkers were poking holes in the efficient market hypothesis. One hole was the paradox about market knowledge. In theory, prices in an efficient market would instantly reflect any new knowledge, so nobody could get “an edge” by finding hidden gems or overlooked bargains. And knowledge about individual companies was expensive to acquire—in those pre-Internet days, it typically meant plane fare and long-distance telephone bills, plus some leased computer time. If the market was so efficient that investors couldn’t profit from their hard-earned knowledge, why would they bother to gather that knowledge in the first place? Yet they did. Other skeptics raised even more fundamental questions: Were human beings really the cool, rational investors envisioned by the efficient market theory?

Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon
by Kim Zetter
Published 11 Nov 2014

Some, like the transmission of unencrypted commands and the lack of strong authentication, were fundamental design issues, not programming bugs, which required Siemens to upgrade the firmware on its systems to fix them or, in some cases, re-architect them. And these weren’t just problems for Siemens PLCs; they were fundamental design issues that many control systems had, a legacy of their pre-internet days, when the devices were built for isolated networks and didn’t need to withstand attacks from outsiders. Beresford’s findings defied longstanding assertions by vendors and critical-infrastructure owners that their systems were secure because only someone with extensive knowledge of PLCs and experience working with the systems could attack them.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
by Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Mar 2015

They become priests without pulpits, politicians without constituencies. They have followings, sure—30,000+ on Twitter for verified user Kevin Antoine Dodson; 670,000+ likes on his Facebook page. But they don’t have dignity, having become a burlesque in the public eye. Perhaps, like Jack Rebney, a pre-Internet viral video star (in the early nineties, outtakes of his swearing and harrumphing through an industrial film shoot for Winnebago became a cult commodity on VHS), they’ll retreat to a mountaintop—Shasta, in Rebney’s case. And then, when they show up in the public eye, we’ll laugh and throw them a few bucks.

The Fissured Workplace
by David Weil
Published 17 Feb 2014

One recent example is the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act of 2010. The law requires major retailers and manufacturers doing business in California to disclose their efforts to stop slavery and human trafficking from their direct supply chains. See http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/164934.pdf. The Clinton administration used a pre-Internet version of transparency in its garment enforcement effort, discussed above. The WHD issued a quarterly “garment enforcement report” listing all apparel suppliers (manufacturers, jobbers, and contractors) found out of compliance in the prior quarter. These written (and later PDF-based) reports provided manufacturers and retailers concerned with potential embargoes under the hot goods program with information on suppliers who might pose problems in this regard.

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
by Antonio Garcia Martinez
Published 27 Jun 2016

I peeled away from the glib pageant of bullshit—Facebook PMMs and salespeople chatting up the marketing heads of brands and the general managers of agencies—sidestepped a velvet rope, and explored the darkened museum. The Museum of Natural History is one of these old-school nineteenth-century monuments to didactic showcasing and taxidermy. Entire halls are dedicated to those artifacts of a pre–motion picture, not to mention pre-Internet, world: dioramas made to look like the Serengeti Plain or the Atacama Desert, filled with lynxes and wildebeests, a domestic-looking pair of rhinos. How long could the museum convince anyone living to look at the stuffed dead, I wondered. Facebook & Co., to whom the museum was pimping out its august real estate, was busily working to nuke the human mind of the necessary attention span.

Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick
by Maya Dusenbery
Published 6 Mar 2018

“It was further suggested that I had brought the disease on myself, that it was all in my head, that the solution was to quit medical school and settle down to a traditional lifestyle.” All told, she saw fourteen physicians (ten of them urologists), but none offered a diagnosis or even relief for her agonizing pain. “Ultimately, I had to make the diagnosis myself,” Ratner says. She marched off to her medical school’s library to search the literature. In those wild pre-Internet days, that meant paging through volume after volume of the Index Medicus, a large index book published annually that listed the medical journal articles from that year. Finally, as the library was about to close and Ratner was about to throw in the towel after two full days and nights of searching, she came across a footnote, which led her to a 1978 article by Stanford researchers about a condition called interstitial cystitis that seemed to match her case exactly.

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu
by Anshel Pfeffer
Published 30 Apr 2018

The first stage of the campaign was registering new members. Levy and Katzav relied on their existing supporters to sign up friends, relatives, and neighbors. Netanyahu’s campaign set up dozens of blue booths in town centers emblazoned with Bibi’s face and the slogan “Netanyahu—Choosing a Winning Leadership.” In the pre-Internet era, much of Israeli political life still took place out on the street. But it was the first time anyone had actually registered new party members on the street. Registering thousands of new members weekly created Netanyahu’s camp out of nothing. Campaign volunteers had an incentive to sign up hundreds of members, making them overnight leaders in their local party branches.

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 14 Oct 2018

She had moved from left to right and back again without batting a socialite eyelid. It was easy to sneer at an eponymous website that had all the trappings of a vanity project. That was the ridiculous bit. The even more laughable proposition: she would be getting her celebrity friends to write – wait for it – for no payment! If you were a journalist from the pre-internet age this was more than risible. It was offensive. Journalists had mortgages: we were professionals. How dare some Californian hostess imagine she could undercut the work of proper paid commentaries by publishing the work of writers who were doing it for nothing? Those who believed this had contempt for large parts of what Web 2.0 represented.

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You
by Scott E. Page
Published 27 Nov 2018

Though the positive feedbacks model cannot be fitted to time series data with the same fidelity as the previous technology model, we can look to experiments to see how feedbacks contribute to inequality. Recall the music lab experiments described in Chapter 6. College students sampled and downloaded music under two treatments. In the first treatment, subjects could not see what music others had downloaded. This treatment captures the pre-internet world. In the second treatment, subjects could see the download numbers for each song. In the treatment without social information, no song receives more than two hundred downloads and only one song receives fewer than thirty. When people can see downloads, one song receives more than three hundred downloads and over half receive fewer than thirty.

How Money Became Dangerous
by Christopher Varelas
Published 15 Oct 2019

Because, unbeknownst to me, one guy could forward it to somebody, but then he could forward it outside the firm. And people were like, ‘You got to hear this.’ It was my first lesson in something going viral. You have a good story about a jilted bisexual lover? It freakin’ cascaded.” This, of course, happened pre-internet, pre–cell phones, pre–social media. Even the phrase going viral didn’t exist yet—that came along a few years later with the arrival of widespread internet. Before voicemail technology, stories were told over a meal or a cup of coffee or by the water cooler. The new voicemail-forwarding technology allowed many more people to share directly in the experience, to listen to the actual voice of the aggrieved lover, rather than receiving the story secondhand.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 14 Sep 2020

According to the legal scholar Eric Posner and the economist Glen Weyl, both free-market superenthusiasts, “antitrust authorities are accustomed to worrying about competition [only] within existing, well-defined, and easily measurable markets”—that is, not within the new market of digital advertising, which now constitutes most advertising. Back in the pre-Internet, pre-cable day, the closest equivalents were the three (highly regulated) TV networks, which together took in maybe 12 percent of all U.S. ad spending. Google and Facebook get almost two-thirds of all digital ad revenue, which is why those two companies alone are worth $1.5 trillion. Our antitrust authorities have gotten out of the habit of being aggressive.

Bleeding Edge: A Novel
by Thomas Pynchon
Published 16 Sep 2013

On balance he’s been good for us, put away some elements that would have eventually turned and bit us.” “Cornelia did imply that you have friends all over the spectrum.” “In the long run, it’s less to do with labels than with everyone coming out happy. Some of these folks really have become my friends, in the pre-Internet sense of the term. Cornelia, certainly. Long ago I briefly courted her mother, who had the good judgment to show me the door.” Maxine has brought Reg’s DVD and a tiny Panasonic player, which Platt, not sure of where the wall outlets are exactly, allows her to plug in. He beams at the little screen in a way that makes her feel like a grandchild showing him a music video.

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks
by Scott J. Shapiro

C2, see Command and Control server CAPTCHA Carroll, Lewis celebrity hacks; see also Hilton, Paris cell phone hacks; see also Hilton, Paris cellular automaton central processing units (CPUs) CFAA, see Computer Fraud and Abuse Act China Chong, Jane Chua, Yi Ting CIA Citizenfour (movie) Clark, Jim Clarke, Richard Clear Web click fraud Clinton, Hillary, campaign (2016): Assange and; DNC hacks and; Fancy Bear phishing and; Guccifer 2.0 hacks and; Putin and; Russian relations and; WikiLeaks and clockwork dolls cloud servers code; Achilles and the Tortoise and; binary strings conversion from; data difference from; duality principle and; instruction pointers and; see also duality principle; metacode; Turing, Alan Coelho, Robert Cohen, Fred Command and Control server (C2) Commander Tosh, see Todorov, Todor Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) CompuServe computer evolution; see also Turing, Alan Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA); DDoS attacks under; introduction of; Morris, R., Jr., case and; requirements and punishments under consumer product hacking, see Internet of Things Cook, Philip Corbató, Fernando “Corby” Cornell University corporate accountability Corsi, Jerome Cozy Bear/the Dukes CPUs, see central processing units CrowdStrike cryptocurrency, see Bitcoin cryptography crypt program CTSS, see Compatible Time-Sharing System cybercrime: “aging out” of; Bitcoin as payment for; as business; corporate data breaches relating to; cyber-enabled and cyber-dependent; early legislation on; empowerment for protection from; extradition for; FBI Kill Chain for; feelings of helplessness about; financial loss due to; global cooperation on; ignorance to threat of; interoperability issues and; moral duality and; Morris Worm debates on; motivations for; pay-per-install malware and; prevention approaches to; profile and psychology; property crime move to; prosecution and penalties; Secret Service investigations of; solutions and interventions for; traditional crime moving into; war paradigm with; youth as feature of cyberespionage: cybercrime compared to; cyberwarfare role of; DNC hacks and; domestic; economic; international law on; NSA tactics for; SolarWinds cybersecurity: black hat hackers transition to; CTSS and; at DCCC and DNC; after DNC hacks; early World Wide Web and; human behavior as threat to; IoT legislation on; Kill Chain model and; in late 1980s; limits of; metacode limits and; Microsoft efforts in; military; moral duality and; Morris Worm lessons of; Multics and; NSA history and approach to; pre-internet; professionals and job market; Reagan executive order on; scientific internet beginnings and; SEC regulation on; social inequality and; solutionism in; terminology; T-Mobile; UNIX and; upcode role in; upcode solutions for; see also specific topics Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency cyberwarfare: Clarke book on; costs and impacts of; cyber clubs and; cyberespionage relation to; defining; DNC hacks relation to; election tampering and; hyperspecialized weapons and; laws on; Russian; sensationalizing; by United States; upcode for; war history and future of Dark Avenger: Bontchev and; Eddie virus of; Gordon and; identity of; maliciousness of viruses by; Mutation Engine creation by; Nomenklatura virus of; psychology of; remorse; virus writers’ anger at Dark Web data: breach accountability; code difference from; deep packet inspection of; duality principle and; see also duality principle; metacode DCCC, see Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Delavan, Charles Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) Democratic National Committee (DNC) hacks: CIA and; Clinton 2016 campaign and; Cozy Bear; cyberespionage and; cybersecurity after; cybersecurity prior to; cyberwarfare relation to; delayed response to; Fancy Bear; FBI investigation of; Guccifer 2.0 and; prosecution for; Putin and; Trump and; WikiLeaks’ publishing of demon Denial of Service attacks, see Distributed Denial of Service attacks Descartes, René DigiNotar Dimov, Peter Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks; Akamai and; CFAA on; DNS records and; on Estonia by Russia; FBI investigations of; financial motivation in; Krebs as target of; MafiaBoy arrest for; Minecraft and Jha beginning with; Mirai versions and imitators of; Rutgers University; solutions for; 2016 increase of; VDoS gang and; see also botnets; Mirai botnet and gang DNA DNC hacks, see Democratic National Committee hacks DNS records DOS operating system downcode: Achilles and the Tortoise logic and; definition of; of UNIX; upcode interplay with; varieties of drivers duality principle Dukes, the, see Cozy Bear/the Dukes EDVAC election tampering; see also Democratic National Committee hacks; presidential election email: basic principles behind; botnets use in spam; characteristics of fake; early providers of; legitimate Google security alert; spoofing; viruses exploiting; worm in; see also phishing EMPACT ENIAC Equifax espionage; see also cyberespionage Estonia ethical hacking, see white-hat hacking “evil maid” attack Facebook famines Fancy Bear: Bitcoin use by; Bitly use by; DNC hack by; Google accounts phishing by; GRU origins of; hacking mistakes of; heuristics exploited by; Lukashev role in; mudges from; name origins; phishing by; Podesta phishing by; state election infrastructure probes by; typosquatting use by; website security certificates and; X-Agent tool of; Yermakov reconnaissance for Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI): DNC hack investigations by; evidence-gathering ability of; hybrid duties of; Kill Chain model; LaCroix raid by; Mirai investigation by; Morris Worm and; NSA surveillance role of; search warrants; surveillance of citizens Federal Sentencing Guidelines FidoNet File Transport Protocol (FTP) Finger: function and principles; Markoff revealing Morris, R., Jr., using; Morris Worm attack on firewalls FISA, see Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act FISC, see Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Five Eyes Flood, Warren Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA): about; citizen surveillance and; reform; transparency about Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) Forys, Jeff FOSS (free and open-source software) Franceschi-Bicchierai, Lorenzo Frank, Robert FSB (Russian security service) FTP, see File Transport Protocol Gates, Bill: internet products development under; Sinofsky work for; on trustworthy computing and security; Windows creation and; see also Microsoft company gender disparity genetics Genovese, Will German Enigma code Gerrold, David Glickman, Dan Glueck, Sheldon and Eleanor Gödel, Kurt Google: Jha and Mirai attacks on; legitimate security alert from; phishing targeting accounts on Gordon, Sarah: antivirus industry opinions on; background; on Dark Avenger identity; Dark Avenger relationship with; Dedicated virus and; malware report by; virus writers study by government surveillance Graham, Paul: Morris, R., Jr., and; on Morris Worm programming Greenwald, Glenn GRU (Russian military intelligence): Fancy Bear origins in; Guccifer 2.0 identity tied to; hacking department; Mueller indictment on hacking by; poisonings by; scouting and recruitment by Guccifer and Guccifer 2.0 Guidoboni, Thomas hackers: Anonymous hactivist; Bitly used by; bulletin boards; childhood origins of; code and data difference exploited by; conventions and methods of; cyber-enabled and cyber-dependent; definition of; dumpster-diving approach of; global differences of; intervention approaches; Kill Chain model used by; learning from one another; mentors and role models for; misapprehensions about; money laundering and cashing out for; motivation for; 1980s cultural view of; physicality principle exploited by; profile and psychology of; proxies use by; reputation; side-channel attacks used by; upcode; virus writing and; vulnerability announcements exploited by; WarGames influence on; women; see also specific events and individuals hacking; alarmism about; Bluetooth technology; business of; consumer “smart” products; escalation of; “evil maid”; financial damages from; history; IP addresses and; kernels; lingo; for public interest; Russian history and education in; social stigma around; solutionism and; speculative execution; SQL injections and; white-hat/ethical; see also specific topics HAL (fictional computer) Harvard University Hawkins, Adrian heuristics: Affect; Availability; dual-process theories and; Loss Aversion; nudging and; operating systems use of; physicality principle and; Representativeness; survival role of Hilton, Paris: cell phone hack; password weakness and; sex tape; in The Simple Life HIV/AIDS Hupp, Jon Hutchings, Alice IBM computers Imitation Game, The (movie) inequities, social instruction pointers international law internet: attacks and outages; basic function and principles of; browsers design and market for; Clear Web; cybersecurity prior to; Dark Web; deep packet inspection of data over; first graphical browsers for; first major viruses exploiting; FTP and; government agencies and; ignorance of workings of; introduction to public; Microsoft product development for; military; Morris Worm impact on; scientific; solutions for safer; speed of evolution; TCP/IP protocols and; vulnerabilities; website security and; World Wide Web beginnings on; worms and design of Internet Explorer Internet of Things (IoT): botnets hacking; security legislation about; security patches internet service providers (ISPs) IoT, see Internet of Things IP addresses; Dark Web and; definition and forms of; DNS servers and; hacks and; see also TCP/IP protocols Iran ISPs, see internet service providers Jacobsen, Nicholas Jha, Paras: background; click fraud of; cybercrime war and; DDoS attack beginnings; evasion techniques; false-flag operation; financial motivations of; Google attacks by; Minecraft obsession of; as Mirai botnet founder; Mirai code dump; on Peterson influence; Poodle Corp botnet of; ProTraf Solutions launch; Rutgers University DDoS attacks by Jobs, Steve juvenile delinquency Kahneman, Daniel kernel building and hacking Kill Chain Klyushin, Vladislav Kozachek, Nikolay Krafft, Dean Krebs, Brian: DDoS attacks targeting; LaCroix and LaCroix, Cameron: arrests and jail sentences for; background of; FBI raid on; Hilton hack by; Krebs and; parole; post-jail hacks of; psychology and motivation of; Sidekick cell phones of; skill of Laub, John Lavigne, Avril laws and legislation; cryptocurrency; cybercrime punishments; cyberespionage; cyberwarfare; data breaches and; DDoS attacks and; disclosure to public; early cybercrime; government metadata collection; international cybercrime; on IoT security; on NSA data collection; Patriot Ac; on search warrants; software vulnerabilities and; upcode and; on warfare; see also Computer Fraud and Abuse Act; Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Lehel, Marcel Lazăr Linux Lohan, Lindsay Loss Aversion Heuristics Lukashenko, Alexander Lukashev, Aleksey Lusthaus, Jonathan macro viruses MafiaBoy malware; Beast; classification and types; coining of term; coordination of computers with; cross-platform; evolution of; Gordon reporting on; hyperspecialization of; Microsoft Word; as national security threat; pay-per-install; selling and acquisition of; viruses contrasted with; X-Agent Russian; see also botnets; viruses; vorms; wiruses; worms Markoff, John Marquardt, David Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): Corbató CTSS invention at; IBM early computers and; Morris as professor at; worm released at Mateev, Lubomir Matrix, The (movie) McGill, Andrew Merkel, Angela metacode metadata: breaches of; government collection of; surveillance capitalism and Microsoft (company); antivirus protection; browsers; copyright suits and; cybersecurity; driver vulnerability approach of; early mission and growth of; internet product development at; legal action against; Minecraft success for; Sinofsky work for; Slivka role at; Winner Take All market and Microsoft Windows Microsoft Word military: cybersecurity; internet; Multics application for; WarGames movie and; see also GRU Milnet Minecraft: about; DDoS attacks and; Jha obsession with Mirai botnet and gang; code dump; DDoS attacks versions and imitators; FBI investigation of; Google attacks by; IoT devices patch and; IoT hacking by; Jha founder of MIT, see Massachusetts Institute of Technology morality Morgachev, Sergey Morozov, Evgeny Morris, Robert, Jr.: background and character of; CFAA and case against; Cornell University attendance and; criminal case against; father’s response to worm of; Graham friendship with; jurors in trial against; lawyer defending; post-trial career of; remorse of; trial testimony of; worm creation motivation of; see also Morris Worm Morris, Robert, Sr.; on Morris Worm creation; NSA job of; UNIX developments by Morris Worm; attack vectors; Bulgarian media on; computer community debates over; cybercrime debates and; cybersecurity actions after; duality principle exploitation with; FBI investigation of; Finger attack by; flaw in code; impact; lessons and increased security from; media coverage on; Melissa virus compared with; motivation for creating; origins; password discovery by; patch for and eradication of; programming of; reinfection rate of; SENDMAIL attack by; Sudduth warning email about Mosaic browser movies and television: artificial intelligence portrayal; Citizenfour (movie); cybersecurity early portrayals in; cyberwar themes in; The Imitation Game; The Matrix; Mr.

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 4 Sep 2017

That list of the means by which leaders in any society try to maintain coherence and order sounds a bit evil and un-American: withholding access, withholding institutional sponsorship, subjecting ideas and those who hold them to scorn, stigmatized knowledge. That’s why elite always has been a pejorative in this country, and why mainstream recently turned into one. It’s also a big reason why, during the last few decades, so many in our boundary-drawing class yielded to so many varieties of nonsense. Pre-Internet information systems, in which accuracy and credibility were determined mainly by experts or otherwise designated deciders, had terrible flaws and annoyances, including complacency, blind spots, snobbishness, and bigotry. But those gates and gatekeepers also managed to keep the worst hogwash out of our mainstream.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
by James Gleick
Published 1 Mar 2011

Indeed, the Internet was in its birth throes. Not only did it provide memes with a nutrient-rich culture medium; it also gave wings to the idea of memes. Meme itself quickly became an Internet buzzword. Awareness of memes fostered their spread. A notorious example of a meme that could not have emerged in pre-Internet culture was the phrase “jumped the shark.” Loopy self-reference characterized every phase of its existence. To jump the shark means to pass a peak of quality or popularity and begin an irreversible decline. The phrase was thought to have been used first in 1985 by a college student named Sean J.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 2 Jun 2021

The case in favour of equality, particularly equality of voting rights, was given a further boost by the anti-slavery movement. The movement trained thousands of women in political activism: the National Loyal Women’s League, which was organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, raised 400,000 signatures in favour of the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery, a formidable accomplishment in the pre-internet age.11 It also raised the question of comparative disadvantage: if black men deserved certain rights based on their common humanity, why didn’t women deserve the same rights? In 1837, Sarah Grimké wrote to the president of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society making an explicit connection between men and slave-owners and women and slaves: All history attests that man has subjugated woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank which she was created to fill.

The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life
by Robert Wright
Published 1 Jan 1994

So technological evolution periodically favors the centralization of power—specifically, when whole new kinds of information technology, such as writing or audio or video or the computer, first appear. Further muddying the long-term pattern is the fact that, in a given place and time, whether a technology conduces to despotism or pluralism or neither can depend on context and contingency. Radio and TV, pre-Internet, could be used in a mildly pluralistic way, as in the United States, or in a totalitarian way, as in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Still, as we’ve seen, in the long run governments have little choice. Even China, an authoritarian (and once-totalitarian) nation, had seen by the late 1990s that it needed the Internet.

The Asylum: The Renegades Who Hijacked the World's Oil Market
by Leah McGrath Goodman
Published 15 Feb 2011

He took a detour in Florida’s South Beach, where he bought some property before heading to Russia, where he observed the Communist regime in its final death throes. The KGB was “following me around,” he said in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, so he left. Marks also invested in a handful of semi-futuristic businesses, including a pre-Internet startup that failed because it was too far ahead of its time. Marks went out west and painted in Berkeley, California. He washed dishes at Esalen on the island of Big Sur. A private adult bohemia offering courses for thousands of dollars each, such as “Soul Motion” and “Being with Your Self,” Esalen billed itself as a utopia for serious intellectuals looking to swap “revolutionary ideas” in clothing-optional environments while sunbathing, hot-tubbing, and enjoying nude massage.

Fantasyland
by Kurt Andersen
Published 5 Sep 2017

That list of the means by which leaders in any society try to maintain coherence and order sounds a bit evil and un-American: withholding access, withholding institutional sponsorship, subjecting ideas and those who hold them to scorn, stigmatized knowledge. That’s why elite always has been a pejorative in this country, and why mainstream recently turned into one. It’s also a big reason why, during the last few decades, so many in our boundary-drawing class yielded to so many varieties of nonsense. Pre-Internet information systems, in which accuracy and credibility were determined mainly by experts or otherwise designated deciders, had terrible flaws and annoyances, including complacency, blind spots, snobbishness, and bigotry. But those gates and gatekeepers also managed to keep the worst hogwash out of our mainstream.

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
by Robert Wright
Published 28 Dec 2010

So technological evolution periodically favors the centralization of power—specifically, when whole new kinds of information technology, such as writing or audio or video or the computer, first appear. Further muddying the long-term pattern is the fact that, in a given place and time, whether a technology conduces to despotism or pluralism or neither can depend on context and contingency. Radio and TV, pre-Internet, could be used in a mildly pluralistic way, as in the United States, or in a totalitarian way, as in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Still, as we’ve seen, in the long run governments have little choice. Even China, an authoritarian (and once-totalitarian) nation, had seen by the late 1990s that it needed the Internet.

Thinking, Fast and Slow
by Daniel Kahneman
Published 24 Oct 2011

In essence, the optimistic style involves taking credit for successes but little blame for failures. This style can be taught, at least to some extent, and Seligman has documented the effects of training on various occupations that are characterized by a high rate of failures, such as cold-call sales of insurance (a common pursuit in pre-Internet days). When one has just had a door slammed in one’s face by an angry homemaker, the thought that “she was an awful woman” is clearly superior to “I am an inept salesperson.” I have always believed that scientific research is another domain where a form of optimism is essential to success: I have yet to meet a successful scientist who lacks the ability to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing, and I believe that someone who lacks a delusional sense of significance will wilt in the face of repeated experiences of multiple small failures and rare successes, the fate of most researchers.

Aerotropolis
by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay
Published 2 Jan 2009

They found a factory near Hong Kong to make a few hundred prototypes, and eventually found another ready to stamp out a few million, if necessary. Their shipments are landing at LAX too— making good on its original promise for airmail—and where would they be without it? For that reason, it’s almost impossible to quantify what the airport means to California. But even a pre-Internet-era estimate pegged its contributions to Los Angeles at $61 billion a year and four hundred thousand jobs in 1995, starting from a mere $3.3 billion in 1970. Escape from LAX Complicating any attempts at a fix has been a decades-long debate over whether the city should focus solely on LAX expansion (and the wrath of litigious neighbors) or build up regional airports to pick up the slack.

More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 9 Jun 2010

“All money managers wish they had a little birdie on their shoulder who might whisper the correct market move from time to time,” Griffin declared. “Well, my little birdie has a deep southern drawl and a bald head. Sometimes I hear him chirp: ‘Big guy, don’t do that.’”31 Under Robertson’s tutelage, young men like Griffin hustled harder than they might have elsewhere, and in the pre-Internet era, hustle counted hugely. The search engines and terminals that later made data ubiquitous had not yet been born; so if a Tiger analyst wanted to know how Ford’s sales were shaping up, he would sit on the phone until he had talked to Ford’s customers, competitors, and suppliers; to the car dealers, part makers, and Detroit rivals; to anyone, indeed, who might have a useful angle.

The Art of UNIX Programming
by Eric S. Raymond
Published 22 Sep 2003

But as the designers of BeOS noticed, the requirements of pervasive networking cannot be met without implementing something very close to general-purpose timesharing. Single-user client operating systems cannot thrive in an Internetted world. This problem drove the reconvergence of client and server operating systems. The first, pre-Internet attempts at peer-to-peer networking over LANs, in the late 1980s, began to expose the inadequacy of the client-OS design model. Data on a network has to have rendezvous points in order to be shared; thus, we can't do without servers. At the same time, experience with the Macintosh and Windows client operating systems raised the bar on the minimum quality of user experience customers would tolerate.

Never Bet Against Occam: Mast Cell Activation Disease and the Modern Epidemics of Chronic Illness and Medical Complexity
by Lawrence B. Afrin M. D. , Kendra Neilsen Myles and Kristi Posival
Published 15 Jan 2016

He really had started smoking, and therefore spontaneous human combustion must be possible. Furthermore, it was most likely that MCAS was the root of all of his problems, so it was now “simply” a matter of figuring out at least one mechanism by which MCAS might theoretically drive spontaneous combustion. In the pre-Internet (indeed, the pre-Yahoo/Google) era, reviewing the literature on something like this would have been very challenging. There simply was no medical literature on the subject (not that I could readily find, anyway). But lack of medical literature didn’t mean the phenomenon didn’t exist. Clearly, the phenomenon, while rare, did exist, so I would have to turn to other literature.

The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to the Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific
by David Bianculli
Published 15 Nov 2016

The identity of her murderer became the biggest pop-culture obsession since the “Who shot J.R.?” mystery on CBS’s Dallas a decade before, and “Who killed Laura Palmer?,” like the J. R. Ewing phenomenon, intensified over the summer and became the cover story of several national magazines. In fact, in those pre-Internet days, the “Who killed Laura Palmer?” mystery, and Twin Peaks in general, generated their own national magazine, which analyzed episodes and plotlines, encouraged letters from other Twin Peaks fans, and interviewed virtually anyone associated with the series. The magazine’s name: Wrapped in Plastic.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
by Marc Goodman
Published 24 Feb 2015

Now you’ve walked outside with a gun in hand, and you are met with six members of the local SWAT team pointing little red lasers at your forehead. This scenario can’t end well. The FBI recorded at least four hundred incidents of swatting in 2013 alone, with victims across the country, from Ohio to California. Mostly, it’s just hackers doing it for the “lulz,” because they can. Pre-Internet days, the big teenage hoax was ordering pizzas and having them sent to the kid you didn’t like in school. Now kids are ordering SWAT units with guns to carry out their pranks. For instance, in 2009 a group of teenagers from Massachusetts were convicted of carrying out more than three hundred swatting attacks.

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
by Walter Isaacson
Published 6 Oct 2014

“It was an Internet-like design, which was a way to distribute communications power to all the people.”93 He realized that the future would be shaped by the distinction between broadcast media like television, which “transmitted identical information from a central point with minimal channels for return information,” and nonbroadcast, “in which every participant is both a recipient and a generator of information.” For him, networked computers would become the tool that would allow people to take control of their lives. “They would bring the locus of power down to the people,” he later explained.94 In those pre-Internet days, before Craigslist and Facebook, there were community organizations known as Switchboards that served to make connections among people and link them to services they might be seeking. Most were low-tech, usually just a few people around a table with a couple of phones and a lot of cards and flyers tacked to the walls; they served as routers to create social networks.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 1 Feb 2022

But the implication that VCs can “only” back software is doubly wrong. For one thing, software touches just about every industry; even if the software-only myth were accurate, it would hardly prove that venture capital is restricted to a narrow area. But the larger point is that, contrary to common perception, the pre-internet tradition of capital-intensive projects remains viable. In 2007 a partnership called Lux Capital raised its first fund with an explicit mandate to avoid the obvious stuff. “No internet, social media, mobile, video games—things that everybody will keep doing,” as its co-founder Josh Wolfe explained it.[13] Instead, Lux invested in areas such as medical robotics, satellites, and nuclear-waste treatment, and the results serve to prove that these capital-intensive challenges are not beyond the reach of venture capital.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara
Published 8 Jul 2019

Yet it went one better, providing anonymized connection through the veil of the username, making it a place for free expression that the dreamers and doers of Community Memory had always hoped the electronic bulletin board might be. The Usenet group was just one flavor of bulletin board service, or BBS, that proliferated in the pre-Internet online world of the 1980s. Most of the people going online were high-income men in their thirties—no surprise, given the fact that this was the demographic targeted by the micro makers—and discussion threads reflected their priorities. In 1985 came the most famous of the early BBSs: The WELL, or Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, started by Stewart Brand and his merry band of hackers up in Marin County.

Commodore: A Company on the Edge
by Brian Bagnall
Published 13 Sep 2005

“Basically we had one guy who was just totally in love with CCD and what you could do with vision, and that was his charter,” recalls Peddle. “He was a very weird guy but he was making that happen. I think they were the first people to show a CCD camera on a personal computer.” Peddle wanted to use the CCD camera to revolutionize personal communications. In the pre-Internet era, phone lines were the only publicly available infrastructure capable of transmitting data across the world. The team researched modems for data transmission. In many ways, the research team was too early with the technology. “Chuck was usually aware of what could potentially happen but not always practical on the timing of when it was commercially possible,” says Spencer.

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture
by Brian Dear
Published 14 Jun 2017

IEEE History Center (New Brunswick, NJ) Oral History Interview by Janet Abbate. Golub, Gene. 1979-06-08. CBI-UM Oral History Interview OH 105 by Pamela McCorduck. Johnson, Roger. 2002-11-29. Interview by James Hutchinson, UIUC ECE. Unpublished. Jones, Steve, and Guillaume Latzko-Toth. 2017. “Out from the PLATO Cave: Uncovering the Pre-Internet History of Social Computing.” Internet Histories 1, nos. 1-2 (2017). Retrieved 2017-05-17 from https://protect-us.mimecast.com/​s/​mmYrB6c7KDzwhY?domain=tandfonline.com Kay, Alan. 2016-06-21. “Alan Kay Has Agreed to Do an AMA Today.” Hacker News. Retrieved 2016-06-21 from https://news.ycombinator.com/​item?

I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution
by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum
Published 19 Sep 2011

They put up with a lot of junk. MICHAEL STIPE: Everyone I knew would find a television set, have beers, and watch The Cutting Edge. It was like The Island of Misfit Toys. All the miscreants and the outcasts and the punks and the fat girls and the kids with bad skin and the queers could gather together around this universe. Pre-Internet, and before the instantaneous sharing of information and knowledge about music or about art, that was it. That was for the Lee Renaldos and the Kim Gordons and the Courtney Loves and the Michael Stipes. DAVE HOLMES: MTV helped create the trench coat–wearing, Cure-loving, zine-reading kid of the ’80s.

My Boring-Ass Life: The Uncomfortably Candid Diary of Kevin Smith
by Kevin Smith
Published 24 Sep 2007

I do the Kev/Van ‘92 Reality Tour with Jen, first showing her the old location of the Vancouver Film School (on Hamilton), then swinging over the Cambie Bridge to the other side of town, detailing the looooong walk to school I used to take, while searching for the house I lived in during my six-month stay (we look for a half hour, but I can’t find it). All the while, I’m having flashbacks to the only time in my life when I was truly lonely. Aside from Mosier (who lived way out in Port Moody), I had no friends in this burg — nobody to hang with. Nobody from back home ever came out to visit me either, and since this was pre-internet, I had very little contact with Jersey. Of all people, Walter was my life-line to Highlands then — writing me handwritten letters detailing the misadventures of Mewes or chatting comics. He always included artwork in his packages, too; indeed, that’s when he’d sent me the drawing of the clown in fishnets that would become our company logo for a decade.

Lonely Planet Eastern Europe
by Lonely Planet , Mark Baker , Tamara Sheward , Anita Isalska , Hugh McNaughtan , Lorna Parkes , Greg Bloom , Marc Di Duca , Peter Dragicevich , Tom Masters , Leonid Ragozin , Tim Richards and Simon Richmond
Published 30 Sep 2017

Over the last decade he’s written literally dozens of guidebooks for Lonely Planet on an oddly disparate collection of countries, all of which he’s come to love. He once again calls Auckland, New Zealand his home – although his current nomadic existence means he’s often elsewhere. Mark Elliott Bosnia & Hercegovina Having already lived and worked on five continents, Mark started writing travel guides in the pre-Internet dark ages. His first work, Asia Overland, was a ludicrously over-ambitious opus covering a whole continent and designed to aid impecunious English teachers make the trip home to Europe from Japan with a minimal budget. It was one of the first guides to help backpackers across the then-new states of the former USSR.

The Rough Guide to New York City
by Rough Guides
Published 21 May 2018

drop-in drawing classes at Spring studio Established in 1992 by artist and inimitable spirit Minerva Durham, Spring Studio (293 Broome St, between Forsyth and Eldridge sts 212 226 7240, springstudiosoho.com; subway B, D to Grand St, F to Delancey St; classes daily; check website for scheduling; $20 per session) is one of the great vestiges of Old New York, offering life drawing lessons in a unique environment. Do not attend a life drawing class here if you are unable to distance yourself from your mobile phone, plan on being late or are uncomfortable with silence. Do drop in if you miss (or are curious about) the pre-internet age, want to work with a fascinating mix of fellow students (many have attended Minerva’s classes for over a decade) and want a brilliant octogenarian teacher. Beginners are encouraged and sessions are small; first-come, first-served (walk-ins only). chinatown and the Lower East Side 47 Canal 291 Grand St, at Eldridge St 646 415 7712, 47canal.us; subway B, D to Grand St.

Seveneves
by Neal Stephenson
Published 19 May 2015

Of course, on the short-range mesh network that the Arkitects had set up to knit the Cloud Ark together, people did it all the time using Scape. But depending on where they were in their orbit, the remnants of the Swarm might be hundreds of thousands of kilometers away from Endurance, far out of mesh range, and so they had to use the same sort of pre-Internet technology that the Apollo astronauts had used to send television signals back from the moon. Eventually Steve did get it going, and then they were treated to a full-face image, in blocky pixels, of a dark-eyed woman with a fine-featured head that had been buzz-cut a few weeks ago and little tended since.

I You We Them
by Dan Gretton

It can try to liberate the generations that follow (look at Canada’s processes for a new understanding of its First Peoples, or the way that the Truth and Reconcilation methodology made such an impact on post-apartheid South Africa); it can also stunt the development of an entire society. To give a single example: some years ago, in the pre-Internet age, I was trying to find out more about Britain’s involvement in Tasmania and the extermination of the indigenous people there. I found my copy of the History Today Companion to British History and turned to the relevant page. The entire entry on ‘Tasmania’ was only twenty-nine words, and only twelve words referred to the genocide – less than half a sentence: ‘The early years were marked by determined destruction of the Aboriginal population; prosperity from wheat-growing was followed by severe depression, saved after the 1880s by mining and forestry.’

Lonely Planet Turkey
by Lonely Planet

Since becoming a Lonely Planet author in 2005, Brett has covered areas as diverse as Vietnam, Sri Lanka, the Czech Republic, New Zealand, Morocco and the South Pacific. Brett also wrote the Plan Your Trip chapters. Mark Elliott Black Sea Coast, Northeastern Anatolia Mark had already lived and worked on five continents when, in the pre-internet dark ages, he started writing travel guides. He has since authored (or co-authored) around 70 books, including dozens for Lonely Planet. He also acts as a travel consultant, occasional tour leader, video presenter, public speaker, art critic, wine taster, interviewer and blues harmonicist. Steve Fallon Eastern Mediterranean With a house in Kalkan on the Turquoise Coast of the Mediterranean, Steve considers Turkey to be a second home.

Reamde
by Neal Stephenson
Published 19 Sep 2011

As a fantasy writer, he was not highly regarded (“one cannot call him profoundly mediocre without venturing so far out on the critical limb as to bend it to the ground,” “so derivative that the reader loses track of who he’s ripping off,” “to say he is tin-eared would render a disservice to a blameless citizen of the periodic table of the elements”), but he was so freakishly prolific that he had been forced to spin off three pen names and set each one up at a different publishing house. And prolific was what Richard needed at this point in the game. Early in his career Devin had set up shop in a trailer court in Possum Walk, Missouri, because he had somehow determined (this was pre-Internet) that it was the cheapest place to live in the United States north of the Mason-Dixon Line. He had refused to deal through lawyers (which was fine with Richard, by this point) and refused to travel, so Richard had gone to see him in person, determined not to emerge from the trailer without a signed contract in hand.