Daily Archives: February 13, 2012

Consent of the Networked

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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.

John Kampfner’s review is here.

Quotes of the day

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“What this whole business goes to show is that Stone is no scholar and Trevor-Roper is no gentleman”.

V.H. Galbraith, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, commenting on Hugh Trevor-Roper’s demolition job on Lawrence Stone in the Journal of Economic History.

“I find it difficult to decide whether T-R is a fundamentally nice person in the grip of a prose style in which it is impossible to be polite, or a fundamentally unpleasant person using rudeness as a disguise for nastiness.”

John Habakkuk, Joint Editor of the Journal of Economic History, in a letter to his fellow-editor, Michael Postan.

Sources: Adam Sisman’s biography of Trevor-Roper, pages 194 & 204.