Name: The control revolution
ISBN: 9780674169869

What Hacker News says

dredmorbiusJun 2026

It's not that the Internet is repeating Star Wars. It's that Star Wars was a fictitious allegory of what power and capabilities provide, and should serve as a warning of what might happen ... or is happening. (I'd hesitate to call The Force a technology per se, though there are other technologies portrayed in the series ... little of which I've watched since Ep. 4-6.)

Technology is a force multiplier, genenerally, and new technologies, after an initial period of disruption, tend to either be adopted by existing power elites, or form new power elites, often a combination of both. I've only come to realise this myself relatively late in the game.

It's instructive to revisit much of the early writing of the Internet. Much of that was strongly hagiographic and deludedly optimistic, but there were exceptions. Andrew J. Shapiro's The Control Revolution (1999) got far more right than wrong.

<https://www.worldcat.org/title/41076267>

<https://archive.org/details/controlrevolutio0000shap>

<http://libgen.vg/book/index.php?md5=9CCE57E117DD4213F395FE07...>

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dredmorbiusJan 2025

The trend was well underway in the mid-aughts, though some might argue that early forum systems, including Slashdot (Slashcode), phpBB, and even AOL forums were precursors (all were Web / app alternatives to Usenet / NNTP, effectively). If you count custom BBS forum software, the trend goes back even further to the early dial-up era of the 1980s. We're talking 300--1200 baud modems here, none of that fancy fast 48/56Kbps stuff.

One of the challenges with open-protocols-based systems is protocol stasis. That is, once a protocol is developed and in wide use, agreeing collectively on change is hard. I've seen this directly (largely on the user-side) with Diaspora* (the platform, whilst it has some good basics, is tragically stuck with design decisions from a decade and a half ago), and Mastodon (itself an attempt to break out of stasis within IRC, StatusNet, GNU Social, and WebFinger). The two sides of that debate tend to register as purist/absolutists who cotton no variance from spec, and expand-and-embrace radicals who are seeking to adapt the protocol for private gain. (The truth of course is that both positions are considerably more nuanced, of course, and good or bad motivations may well exist on either side.)

We're seeing part of this play out with HTML/HTTP (now largely captured by Google) and SMTP (largely moribund) where on the one hand a highly complex spec largely serving the interests of publishers and advertisers over readers exists (HTML/HTTP) (see especially Drew Devault's account of how insanely complex it is to write an HTML renderer from scratch), and in the case of SMTP, many failures (privacy, security, spam, workflow integration) of email to adapt to new needs and concerns.

The result is that we rely less on open standards (making lock-in more prevalent, and new entry more challenging), existing standards are either static (SMTP) or so bloated as to lock out new entrants (HTML/HTTP), and larger aspects of online exchange get locked into proprietary stacks, protocols, platforms, and actors, with what development does occur largely addressing corporate rather than community / societal needs.

For someone who was pitched on the promise and liberation of information technologies from the 1970s onward, and was present as the modern Web and online world has emerged, it's tremendously disappointing, though there've been some lessons learned, if by me rather than the world at large. It's been interesting to watch major social rights advocates, of both the digital and broader stripes, come to terms with this (EFF, ACLU, and others), and shift their tunes considerably.

For the younger set who didn't experience this, or the older set who've forgotten or weren't paying attention, it's increasingly revealing to visit works being published over the course of this development, beginning with some of the earliest RAND monographs in the 1960s, whether cautionary or enthusiastic. I find the cautionary takes have worn better.

A partial bibliography here: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/105074933053020193>

I'd add to that Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace and Andrew Shapiro's Control Revolution, both published in 1999.

<https://archive.org/details/codeotherlawsofc0000less>

<https://archive.org/details/controlrevolutio00andr>

Alvin Toffler's Future Shock addresses this specific issue only slightly, but is another historically interesting and significant take on what was, now over fifty years ago, the future of technological, informational, and cultural development:

<https://archive.org/details/isbn_0553132644>

As I've noted here recently, that book's prognostications can be divided into TK-count, ahem, three categories: technical, psychological, and social. The first is largely over-optimistic, with a general (though not total) exception in the case of information technology. The latter is strongly cautionary and relatively accurate. The third now reads as hopelessly outdated, largely as it has become the current socio-cultural environment.

See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42688251>

Books on the impact of media and society are also worth considering. Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Eisenstein#The_Print...>, as well as earlier works by McLuhan, Harold Innis, and Walter J. Ong. I'm increasingly convinced that changes to information technology and systems, from the advent of speech, writing, and maths to the present, have absolutely profound impacts on the societies in which they emerge (and those proximate to them). They act as power-multipliers on other technological advances, notably in agriculture, metallurgy, fuels, mechanics, electromagnetism, etc., but even on their own are highly underappreciated.

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dredmorbiusApr 2024

Discussion of AI is increasingly prevalent in many areas. I'm not convinced that the pitches for what AI can or might do will pan out, but I've no doubt at all that there will be a huge scramble in any number of areas (technology, investment, startups, media, governance, ...) to adopt, promote, explore, regulate, and abuse the tech.

Having been around and in the tech world at the time, the general feeling is reminiscent of the buzz, hype, and cons around the World Wide Web in the mid-to-late 1990s, as people were starting to hear about it, not understanding much of what it might do, and making all kinds of bold predictions of the utopia or dystopia which might result. The reality ... matched little of any of that discussion.[1]

The Web largely addressed distribution, taking the place of both the printing press and various channels (physical and broadcast) of media distribution. Generative AI is more about how content itself is generated and evaluated, and has the added twist that it is very much a black box, including to those who create the models and systems, which will undoubtedly change what its own ultimate effects and impacts are, though again there's a likely wide range of positive and negative factors.

I follow numerous media and podcasts, on a wide range of topics and languages, and AI has been popping up with extreme frequency in many of them.

Whether it's good or bad, this is undeniably big.

________________________________

Notes:

1. An exception to the poor predictions is Andrew L. Shapiro's The Control Revolution (1999), which I'd read for the first time a year or two ago. It seems to me to have done a quite good job of exploring both the upsides and downsides of the Web, and remains worth reading, though as a historical document now.

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dredmorbiusOct 2022

Substack, a media company, complaining that Substack's media message has been misunderstood by virtue of its own success is ... its own troubling sign. "The term “newsletter” was just a rhetorical device...".

Substack's assertion that "[w]e are part of a seismic shift in the media economy that is all about writer and creator ownership and independence" shows a parlous ignorance of the past 30+ years of the Web, online publishing, content, distribution, and advertising, and the tendency for all to concentrate over time. Gatekeepers cannot be eliminated, only moved, and frequently consolidated (with Substack being a key contender for that role, see present concerns over online media monopolies and the inherent tensions between moderation, expression, censorship, disinformation, propaganda, fraud, surveillance, and manipulation. As I've pointed out before all are inherent attributes of a media monopoly (or consolidation in general): <https://archive.ph/8ceqI>, discussed at the time on HN: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24771470>

I'd also very strongly recommend Andrew J. Shapiro's exceedingly prescient 1999 book, The Control Revolution, which covers the prospects, and risks, of online media, amongst numerous other topics:

<https://www.worldcat.org/title/41076267>

<https://archive.org/details/controlrevolutio0000shap>

<http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=9CCE57E117DD4213F395FE07...>

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dredmorbiusFeb 2022

For those interested in the problems, and solutions, that increasingly complex businesses and operations provided and created, I can't recommend James Beniger, The Control Revolution (1984) highly enough.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/control-revolution-technologi...

https://archive.org/details/controlrevolutio0000unse

https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=01E624258AF1B44F6649B02...

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_nato_Oct 2019

The Control Revolution book goes into some great detail about Quaker Oats. Fascinating stuff regarding hacking the minds of the masses.

A very brief overview of it: http://blog.snailtext.com/posts/quaker-oats.html

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