Absurdity, Allegory and China

What’s the role of Web 2.0 tools in the political sphere, especially in countries ruled by authoritarian regimes?  Evgeny Morozov and Clay Shirky take on this and other issues regarding the real power (or lack of it) of Twitter, Facebook and other social networking programs that have been hailed as revolutionary democratizing tools in this [...]

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I am a hard sell when it comes to supporting conspiracy theories. That said, I am also not one to buy into private corporations’ self-promoting jingles, even if they have a long trail of mission statements, supportive philosophical documents, digitally spinning prayer wheels and mumbled mantras. Google doesn’t get a pass because they preach a [...]

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This post began as a response to a comment in an earlier blog post, where my friend Paul recommended that I read the following link: Google vs China: capitalist model, virtual wall, which I have done, and which initiated this entry. What I see at this point as possibly the most important aspect in this [...]

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I have slept “on the speech” and I must be frank, nothing more came to me that I didn’t go to bed with. Perhaps, you might think, reading Samuel Beckett’s Molloy as I nodded off didn’t help, but I’d argue that anything Beckett is required for preparing for the discussion of any topic that is [...]

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I was fortunate enough to watch live last evening the informative roundtable discussion hosted by the New America Foundation Authority, Meet Technology: Will China’s Great Firewall Hold? as I mentioned yesterday here. For those interested in internet freedom on the eve of Secretary of State Clinton’s speech on the subject, I’ve embedded the YouTube link [...]

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