the Baby Boomers. Had they been the most destructive, selfish generation in American history? A reaction against the selflessness of their parents? Retired to leave the rest of us to pay their future medical bills and oggle their underfunded pensions, to cope with the manipulated political system they’d sued into existence. Or had they left a legacy of tolerance, an echo of 1968's optimisitic energy, a firming of American confidence. But, anyhow, Generation X? By comparison irrelevant: A collection of sad, passive slackers.
But the great Internet companies were largely built by Generation X. The foundational experience of 1989 - the fall of the Berlin Wall - bred optimism. It created, in fact, the possibility for a new exploration. When we were told “Be generous in what you accept,” this seemed reasonable and, eventually, lucrative. The logic and power of networks became apparent by itself, the moment we began connecting the world. So linkage in trade and finance and friendship was pressed out into a new era of globalization, pushed as much by the smashing, enthusiastic removal of so many historical limits as it was by the technology itself. Yes WiFi and TCP/IP and other advances made wiring the world possible, but I wonder if they would have developed so quickly if the context for using them hadn't provided a feedback loop of such quick profit and reward and, frankly, amazement. So, in this fashion, we laid the groundwork for a world of billion-plus user platforms. For a new concept of power.
But the Snowden papers were a shock. We knew him, in a sense. His mannerisms and thinking and technical instincts harmonized with our own. It was as if the NSA had enrolled most of the digitally visible world into a twisted panopticon of a social network, one where your “membership” began the moment one of your data packets was sniffed or chased along fiber optic lines. Here was a secret three billion- user platform, in a sense, that had enmeshed, without their knowledge or permission, a tremendous chunk of humanity. People of interest. The one or two or three billion people swept into systems like the NSA’s Aurora fell victim to the powerful leverage of scaled systems: The more people monitored by the NSA, the more leads to follow, which meant still more people needed to be followed and knitted unwittingly into the web.
No one in my generation who had been around tech for long was naive. We knew that like soldiers coming back from a war there were things done on the network - the spreading of danger, of inequality, of pollution - that would have to be paid for in balance by the benefits the system promised to bring. The immensity of what had been built already in networks was clear enough; the even greater power yet to come as trillions of more connections piled together was implicit, obvious even. The perverse, sneaky side of this growth was known to anyone who'd spent time working a connected machine. But that people of our generation could on the one hand listen to “Karma Police” and on the other enact the sick OK Computer logic of surveillance, even name a British GCHQ monitoring program after the Radiohead song? The aim: Provide "either (a) a web browsing profile for every visible user on
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