Friday, 20 April 2012

Cyber-utopianism

Cyber-utopianism as a concept was first coined by Evgeny Morozov in his book The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, this utopianism is a belief that online communication is in itself emancipatory and that the Internet favors the oppressed rather than the oppressor. Morosov calls this belief naive and stubborn for its refusal to acknowledge its downside.  He goes on to blame the "former hippies" in the 1990s, for causing this utopian belief.
"Cyber-utopians ambitiously set out to build a new and improved United Nations, only to end up with a digital Cirque du Soleil"   Origins Californian ideology The Californian Ideology is a set of beliefs combining bohemian and anti-authoritarian attitudes from the counterculture of the 1960s with techno-utopianism and support for neoliberal economic policies. These beliefs are thought by some to have been characteristic of the culture of the IT industry in Silicon Valley and the West Coast of the United States during the dot-com bubble of the 1990s.[citation needed] Adam Curtis connects it to Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophies. This ideology fuelled the first the generation of Internet pioneers.