The Internet’s Thinkers
(Cet article est en anglais ; pour le voir en Français, lire ici).
Who are the most important thinkers of the Internet ? What are the must-read books to understand the Internet ? I suggest in this article my favorites Web “intellectuals” and their key books.
Three “fathers” to begin with
– George Orwell. The british writer, who wrote the seminal dystopian novel 1984 is the father of the modern reflexion on the “orwellian” world of today.
– Marshall McLuhan. The canadian intellectual understood avant many how the society can become a network. “The Global Village” stays at one of his most famous expression.
– Gilles Deleuze. In Mille plateaux, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze invented the concept of “rhizomes”, a kind of Web before the Internet.
A few intellectuals
– Zygmunt Bauman. The polish philosopher invented the concept of “liquid modernity”. We use it when we discuss our “liquid society” or the concept of “liquid democracy”.
– Bruno Latour. The French sociologist tries to think the new methods of social science thanks to the technologies. Bruno Latour discusses also the “digital humanities”.
Some mavericks
– Lawrence Lessig. A law professor at Harvard, Lessig invented the “creative commons”. His books are rethinking the copyright future. His books include The Future of Ideas ; Free Culture ; Remix. (Listen here a podcast about Lessig and the future ofcopyright).
– Nicholas Negroponte. The founder of MIT’s Medialab (Boston), a writer and the director of the NGO “One laptop for child”. (Lister here a podcast about e-learning and here a podcast on the history of the Medialab at MIT).
– Evgeny Morozov. The sceptikal Belarusian, now American, is one of the most agressive critics about the Internet. OK ! But as a leftist and neo-marxist, he prefers in a scary way, as he told me in an interview, the Venezuela of Chavez than the model of the US or the EU. (Listen here to my interview with Evgeny Morozov).
– Tim Wu. Law professor at Harvard, he invented the concept of “net neutrality”. He is the author of The Master Switch, The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (Vintage Books, 2011)
– Danah Boyd. Professor at the Berkman Center at Harvard, she works on the digital uses of the youth and teenagers. She writes extensively on social networks.
– William Gibson. Writer and A fiction and non-fiction writer, Gibson as been one of the father of the cyberpunk movement.
– Ray Kurzweil. He has written books on health, robotics, life extension, artificial intelligence (AI) and transhumanism. Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements. (On transhumanism, listen this podcast).
– Gabriella Coleman. An American specialist of the hacker culture and online activism. She wrote, amont other subjects, on the Anonymous.
– Michael Gladwell. A New Yorker’s journalist and a best-seller author, Gladwell tries to think the consequences of the Internet to political mobilization. In his famous article , “Small Changes, Why the revolution will not be tweeted” (New Yorker, october 2010), he said basically : “None”. Unfortunatelly for him, the “arab springs” made him wrong. The Umbrella Revolution confirmed that.
– Sherry Turkle. A professor at MIT who works on how technologies are changing our way of working and thinking.
– Kate Crawford. Also professor at MIT, Ms Crawford works on the consequences of big datas on our lives.
Some economists
– Jérémy Rifkin. The US economist discusses the disruption of labour in the digital age. He published, among other works : The Third Industrial Revolution (2011), The Age of Access (2000) et The End of Work (1995).
– Chris Anderson. Co-founder of Wired, he coined the expression “The Long Tail”.
A few techies
– Lou Montulli. As an engineer at Netscape, he invented in 1994 the “cookie”. Then we have the “long click”, big datas (listen here a podcast on that and, here, another one on data mining) and native advertissment.
– Tim Berners-Lee, Vinton Cerf et Bob Kahn. The British and the two Americans are the founding fathers of the World Wide Web and the TCP/IP protocol.
– Ada Lovelace. A rare women in our list, the daughter of Lord Byron invented the first algorithm in 1840.
– Alan Turing. One of the founder of modern technologies with a clear view on the Web.
A few writers
– David Foster Wallace. The American writer, born in 1962, wrote the book that, like Ulysse’s Joyce, eveybody wants to read but nobody can ! Infinite Jest is a fat, long, messy book, that you can read in a serendipity way. David Foster Wallace killed himself in 2008. (Listen here to the collectives lectures of Infinite Summer)
– Jonathan Franzen. The American writer wrote an interesting article on privacy in the digital age (“Imperial Bedroom”, The New Yorker, Oct. 12, 1998 : read it here). His last novel, Purity, has a lot also about technologies and hackers.
– Thomas Pynchon. The American writer wrote on the subject in Bleeding Edge, 2013.
– Dave Eggers. In his novel The Circle, Dave Eggers discribes how Google works ! When the fiction is stronger than reality.
– Aurélien Bellanger. A French writer, Bellanger tells the story of Xavier Niel, the founder of the giant telco company Free, in “Théorie de l’information”.
– Joshua Cohen. The New Jersey’s writer published Book of Numbers.
Last but not the least
To finish: here are some names of key people in the Internet history who have been less intellectuals than business or engineers, but not less influential: Steve Jobs (Apple’s founder), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook’s founder), Jimmy Walles (Wikipédia’s founder), Richard Stallman (free software evangelist), Howard Rheingold (who thinks about “virtual communities”), Sherry Turkle (the MIT professor on how our ideas are also changing thanks to the Internet, not just our activities), Norbert Wiener (one of the founder of cybernetics) and, of course, the one who changes Internet forever : Edward Snowden.
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(Cet article est en anglais ; pour le voir en Français, lire ici).
> To Participate. This article will be updated : to suggest other names let us know your own recommendations on Twitter at : https://twitter.com/martelf
– Our journalist Olivier Tesquet from Télérama (@oliviertesquet), who was not able to join us for the radio show, suggests the following thinkers : Norbert Wiener, author of “Cybernetics” or “The Human Use of Human Beings” ; as a novelist, Neal Stephenson (for “Cryptonomicon” or “Snow Crash”) ; Fred Turner (author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture) ; Tom Standage (author of “The Victorian Internet”) and, also, very opinionated : Steven Levy for “Hackers” and James Bamford for “The Puzzle Palace” (the first book on the NSA).
Other suggestions made on Twitter (https://twitter.com/martelf) :
– Added by @NicolasLoubet : Paul Graham, Marc Andreeseen and the “cyberpunk genre” novelist : Bruce Sterling.
– Added by @GillesCandau : Satoshi Nakamoto (Bitcoin) ; Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman.
– Added by @joacattack (from Mexico) : Kevin Kelly (editor of Wired and author of New Rules for the New Economy) and Jaron Lanier (author of You are not a gadget).
– Added by @A_Moatti : Jacques Ellul (author of Le Bluff Technologique).
– Added by @Nicolasbole : Fred Turner (author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture).
– Added by @objetivarte : John Perry Barlow.
– Added by @LauraForcisi : Ted Nelson and Steward Brand.
– Added by Claire Richard (Rue89) : a dozen women are added to our list. Some are included here.
> Radio/To Listen. This article is written as an add-on of the radio show “Soft Power”. This specific program on “the Web’s thinkers” has been broadcasted on French NPR/France Culture/Radio France on Sunday Dec. 27, 2015. You can listen the program here in podcast (in french).
> Thanks. Thanks to the following journalists for their help for this article: Emmanuel Paquette (L’Express), Marjorie Paillon (France 24), Pierre Haski (Rue 89) et Jean-Baptiste Soufron (Technikart).
> Further readings : a few elements of this article, the Sillicon Valley’s matrix and the idea of the web fragmentation are directly taken from my book Smart (see here). This book is now available in a dozen languages and will be available in english in 2016.