A00098 - Book of the Month for December 2022: Cloud Empires: John Perry Barlow
"Cybervisionaries like John Barrow had imagined that the Internet would give rise to social order beyond the reach of governments and powerful corporations. Yet by the late 2000s, it was clear that the Internet was giving rise to corporations that, if anything, were even more powerful than before." Cloud Empires, pgs. 132-133. In reading Cloud Empires, I find that the libertarian seeds sown by those like John Perry Barlow in the 1990s has sadly produced rather monstrous corporations that seem to diminish humanity. So far, I have read the foundational stories for Ebay, Silk Road, Upwork, Uber, Amazon, and Bitcoin. In the beginning, these technological corporate innovations were often designed to minimize the role of government. However, over time, the innovations often became monsters themselves. I suppose with a title like Cloud Empires , one has to assume that the word "Empires" is an apt description of these new corporate entities and that, as...