Dear Habermas Logo A Jeanne Site
Distance Alternatives

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Latest update: April 25, 2000
E-Mail Curran or Takata.

Musings by the Research Team

On April 5, 2000, Jerry Gilmore wrote:

Chapter 2 and 3 of Code reveal the intentions that the government has for Internet users. The programs are in place for the privacy invasion of the unsuspecting citizen who uses the Internet for personal interactions and business dealings. Code tells how easily the authorities can search through personal aspects of each citizen's life without a search warrant. Instead they simply can activate a worm that could be built into the various computer programs that are offered with the PCs. Jeanne, the book is getting very interesting. It is opening my eyes to all the possibilities of control that the government has over the people that enjoy the so called "freedom" of cyberspace.

On Tuesday, April 25, jeanne responded:

Once again, Jerry, this highlights the need for "awareness" on our part of the fragility of our freedoms. The research team on downsizing has tried to redefine such actions on the part of government/corporate interests as a crime in that they cause very real harm and deny very real access. But we as a society are unused to thinking in such terms. Cyberspace, unlike the face-to-face world of 20th century reality, needs no such direct action, when the writing of code can have such an effect.

The decentered world of the poststructuralists and the postmodernists gathers importance in this world of discourse. In the 20th Century we spoke of "the white male" as the cause of much suffering. He became, in Charles Lemert's analysis, the zero-signifier, the center against whom opposition to inequality was directed. But here, in Code, we see the "white male" quite as befuddled as we are by this world with no apparent center, all code, or language. This concept is much more slippery than one based on class and power. Who, in fact, has the power? It feels much more like a shell game, doesn't it?