What’s New with Wu

They had this figured out in 1922 - that advertising could make radio awful.

Thanks to the Radio History web site.

My long planned series, American Lawbreaking, is running this week in Slate.

In an academic paper published in 1968, this cartoon:

“The Computer as a Communication Device” Science and
Technology, April 1968

I’ve started drafting my Network Neutrality book.

Its beginning with the inter-galatic network — the vision of networking begat by J.C.R. Licklider, the MIT professor and the first person to fund Internet research through ARPA.
Licklider was a genius of rare lucidity.   Unlike many of the great visionaires of the 20th century, most of his ideas have come true.  Part pyschologist, he dreamed of computers that could extend human capacity, and a network that might connect every computer and human on earth.   If those seem that fait accompli by now, that’s the testament to his particular genuis.
One of his visions, while it may seem simple enough now, is that computers would be used for, and would in fact revolutionize, communications.   That’s it. Simple, but look how much came from that idea.
Here’s more, from the 1960s:

we believe that we are entering a technological age in which we will be able
to interact with the richness of living information—not merely in the passive
way that we have become accustomed to using books and libraries, but as
active participants in an ongoing process, bringing something to it through
our interaction with it, and not simply receiving something from it by our
connection to it.

I have started work on a new Slate series — “Lawbreaking in America.”

Dahlia Lithwick who I LOVE working with will be the editor.

The idea of the series is to take a snapshot of how Americans relate to their laws, right now.  The first two in the series are on:
1. Pornography

2. Drug laws
.. more to come obviously!

A review of our book (”Who Controls the Internet“), by writer Kirerren McCarthy, that was both generous and thoughtful. While critical in parts, it got what the book was trying to get at
…
“I finished it this morning. And my gut feeling is that this is a very important book. Not only does it cover a big hole in knowledge and understanding of the Internet, but it is also well written, easy to understand, concise, coherent and thoughtful. I strongly suspect it will be ones of those books that informs opinion and so has a lasting, global influence far beyond what you could expect from 226 pages of text. …

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