*Originally published on November 12, 2020. This is Part 4 of the six-part 2020 Massey Lecture series Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society. Find the rest of the series here.
The internet was supposed to be our salvation. While historically power has remained in the tight grasp of a select few, the initial vision of the internet was that it would empower individuals and expose the wrongdoings of state and corporate interests.
According to Misha Glenny, author of Dark Market: CyberThieves, CyberCops and You, back in the 1990s, “everyone had this tremendous hope that the internet was going to be this great tool of democratization.”
And at first, it was. In 2011, “we all watched in shock as long-standing dictators succumbed to the ‘people power’ of the social media age,” says Ron Deibert, founder of the Citizen Lab, which focuses on the internet and human rights…
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