Tag Archives: corporations

What have we done with the Internet?

Fierce Planet Posted on by

What it is, is up to us. — Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community I think of myself as an OG Internet inhabitant, because I was one of the early commercial consumers who arrived online after NSFNet began to release control of the network to corporate actors. For me, that began in 1993. I had been hanging around bulletin board systems (BBSs) for a year or two, after peace activists I worked with started to use computers for communication and organizing. I ended up on a system I’d heard of some years before, The Well, created in 1985 and … Continue reading →

Elizabeth Warren

Fierce Planet Posted on by

I simply don’t believe we’ll ever see her as the head of the Consumer Protection Agency. Which is too bad, because she has a singular understanding of the importance of that post, and of the ways in which our economy as it is currently structured works against ordinary middle-class people and those who aspire to the middle class. But the owners, the super-rich for whom our economy really works, and their compliant enablers in the Congress, will never allow a real progressive in that post. It might cost them too much money. I’d be delighted to be wrong, but I … Continue reading →