I’ve just got Rebecca MacKinnon’s new book and am looking forward to reading it. But at the same time as it arrived I also got notification of her talk at the Boston launch of the book. It’s vintage MacKinnon: intelligent, informed, perceptive. I particularly like her concept of the “Sovereigns of Cyberspace” — Zuckerberg, Bezos, Page, Brin, Apple, Microsoft. I also like her use of the “information ecology” metaphor: we’ve moved from an ecosystem characterised by scarcity (a desert) to one characterised by abundance (a rain-forest) and the challenge is to devise a system of governance for that.
