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John Perry Barlow

His greatest acheivement for the Internet was the foundation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) with Mitchell Kapor in 1990. Long before most people had even heard of the Internet, EFF was fighting for civil liberties in the digital realm, protecting freedom of expression and privacy on computers and the Internet.

Barlow ‘is a recognized commentator on information economics, digitized intellectual goods, cyber liberties, virtual community, electronic cash, cryptography policy, privacy, and the social, cultural, and legal conditions forming in Cyberspace.’

His The Economy of Ideas and A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace have become incredibly influential works in Internet thought.

Tim Berners-Lee

‘Tim invented the World Wide Web in late 1990 while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. He wrote the first WWW client (a browser-editor running under NeXTStep) and the first WWW server along with most of the communications software, defining URLs, HTTP and HTML.’

He built the Web on the foundation of shared exploration and open information which still stands as a pillar for all web-workers.

Douglas Engelbart

In 1964, Engelbart began work on one of the great Internet precursors, the Augment Workstation.

These workstations were seen as windows into a shared world of infromation, where people could work collectively, interweaving and even editing documents together.

Today, his Bootstrap Institute still works for the same ideals, citing it's mission as seeking to ‘Enable a whole new way of thinking about the way we work, learn, and live together’ and to ‘Promote development of a collective IQ among, within, and by networked improvement communities.’

Guy Debord

Although his greatest work was written long before the Internet created it's own virtual world, Debord's writings and films speak to the same issues of psuedo-society and commercialization of culture we tangle with on the Internet today.

If I had to spend eternity with just one book, I think this would be it.

Paulo Friere

This is another man who's greatest work was acheived outside the realm of the Internet. But his ideas on Activism are essential for anyone working for social change.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he approaches social activism not just as a battle between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’, but as a communal process of education for all involved.

He also attacked the fragmentation and ownership of society long before patents on life and the abuse of the concept of intellectual property made this trend so painfully apparent.

‘The oppressor consciousness tends to transform everything surrounding it into an object of its domination. The earth, property, production, the creations of men, men themselves, time - everything is reduced to the status of objects at its disposal.’

‘A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favour without that trust.’

Geert Lovink

A member of Adilkno, the Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge, he works for social change through independant media, including work with the Internet and camcorders.

Through nettime, he has helped raise the level of discussion of Internet culture. Textual LSD, the nettime mailing list offers mind-expansion delivered to your inbox daily!

I can't reccomend joining this list enough; there really is nothing quite like it on the Internet.

Ted Nelson

Where do I start? Ted Nelson is considered the inventor of the words ‘hypertext’ and ‘hypermedia’. But there's more than fancy linguistics to this man.

Xanadu is a step past the internet. With the concept of a transcopyright, he hopes to create a commercial system which will realize all the abstract theories for intellectual property management on the Internet.

His 1974 book Computer Lib (out of print but you can read some great reviews), written at the onset of the computer revolution, was a rabble-rousing foray into the personal computer's potential for social upheaval.

Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky is a rare breed: an Internet Analyst who's
a)not whoring his own product
b)Not full of shit

Writing on Economics & Culture, Media & Community, and Open Source, he has an amazing degree of foresight in his analyses, and a knack for putting complex concepts down in simple, accesible terms.

‘Professor Shirky's writings are currently focussed on:
* The Internet's effect in shifting power from producer to consumer in the media landscape.
* The Internet economy, and especially its effect on national culture.
* Open Source Software and the post-PC network ecology’

‘Clay testified against the Communications Decency Act as an expert witness on the culture of the Internet, in an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court. Working with the Society for Electronic Access, he has filed commentary with the Federal Government concerning the Clipper chip "key escrow" scheme, Digital Signature Standards, and computer crime sentencing guidelines.’

Check his bio here, and be sure to read this classic piece at SlashDot.

Linus Torvalds

Linus was a major force behind Linux, and with the help of EFF, helped popularize the GNU General Public License (GPL), an Open Source business model that allows people to develop and profit from each other's work, as long as they keep their source open and allow others to similarly profit.

Whether or not Linux ever really impacts Microsoft's monopoly, his popularization of the GPL alone is a fantastic contribution to society.

Jeffrey Zeldman

The internet may have started out with ideals of open standards, but as big corporations got into the show and the browser wars began, the web became an increasingly fragmented place. Flying in the face of the W3C's standards, Explorer and Navigator began to implement their own proprietary methods for digesting content on the web.

In order to support these maverick browsers, developers had to create several versions of every site, or spend countless hours working around the proprietary quirks of each browser and version.

But this isn't about wasting web designer's time.

The big issue is that barriers of entry had suddenly been thrust on what was meant to be an open industry. An independent programmer creating a browser could no longer be confident that his or her browser would work if he or she stuck to the accepted guidelines. Now, the programmer had to worry about what the big guys were doing, actually mimicking their bugssince everyone was coding that way anyway.

Essentially, a few corporations were dictating the guidelines of the web, flying in the face of accepted open standards.

But then, Jeffrey to the rescue!

WaSP, The Web Standards Project, was founded to get these boys back on track. Through relentless awareness-raising in the web community, the browser upgrade campaign, and pressure on the big browser makers, WaSP has made the Web a much cleaner place, at least code-wise.

There's still a while to go, but the latest version of both Explorer and Navigator comply with the W3C's open standards, and this would not have happened without the work of Jeffrey Zeldman and the other fine folk at WaSP.

This is an evolving list. Add to it!

Since man first broke stone into blade, our exploration of this world has been entangled with technology. ‘I suspect that one of the reasons the story of technological progress continues to hold such power is that it literalizes a quest myth we can no longer take seriously in ourselves. Machines articulate and define themselves against the messiness of organic nature, a world whose laws and limits they both exploit and conquer...’

And as our exploration of this world becomes increasingly vicarious through the machines we build, we become the sex-organs of these machines, existing to create, replicate and develop our inventions. Thus, man and tech are inextricably linked, not physically like a cyborg, but socially like a network.

This is just one of the myriad themes Erik Davis explores in Techgnosis: myth, magic + mysticism in the age of information. He looks at the human side of technology, or rather, the souls humans evoke in technology, and his analysis demands that we appreciate these ethereal aspects of our work as we devlop for the Internet.

Dust or Magic, by Bob Hughes, is the most inspiring book I have read on interactive media. Although the technology he discusses (Hypercard for instance) are outdated, the themes he explores are timeless.

After a brief history of pre-cur-sors to the Internet (and computers in general), he examines the process of building interactive work, approaching it as a William Morris Arts and Crafts collaboration, versus a Henry Ford assembly-line industrialization

No one in this field should work any longer without reading this book, especially project managers.

‘Open Source has changed the world and isn't done yet’

In Rebel Code: Linus Torvalds, Open Source, and the War for the Soul of Software, by Glyn Moody, we get an in-depth account of the history of Linux.

Linux, for you plebes out there, is a free, Open Source operating system, which means that, like windows, it lets you talk with your computer, but unlike windows, it is free (as in money) and free, as in FREEEEEEE like the wind.

Built on the principles of GNU General Public License, anyone is free (there's that word again) to download and alter the source for the Operating System, and can even make a profit from the derivative work he or she creates, as long as that code remains free for others to alter and profit from.

Mr. Moody pretty much keeps the discussion of Open Source within the confines of programming, but as we've seen, open source can be a powerful approach that can be applied in many situations.

‘Humanity is a ‘thing,’ and they posess it.’

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Friere rethinks activism as education, and in the process rethinks education as collaboration rather than passive reception.

‘No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for redemption.’

‘A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favour without that trust.’

Friere zeroes in on the problem with most ‘development’ in ‘developing’ nations. Much of this charitable work is merely a more subtle and insidious form of colonization: the ‘developed’ are left dependendent on the nations doing their developing.

Like the village well that breaks, and the foreigner needs to drive in on his air-conditioned land rover to fix it. Or worse, the villagers who, expecting the same seed dole they received the previous year, are reluctant to plant their own seeds, waiting past the optimum planting time in the hopes for a free lunch, sabotaging their own system and crops as a result.

If you want to make any positive change in the world, read this book first. I have seen too many good intentions pave hell for the recipients already...

Guy Debord may have written Society of the Spectacle decades ago, but his language speaks to the Internet of today.

‘In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.’

Picture this. You're driving through Africa. You've seen the motorcycle taxis and hand-painted barber shop signs. But it's not until you get into the bush and the vista opens to a wide plain dotted with mud huts to the horizon that it clicks. This is Africa, you think, this is the real Africa.

But where did you get that image of Africa from? Assuming you've never been there before, it was probably Lawrence of Arabia, or perhaps National Geographic.

Image.

Not reality. Yet this reality of Africa seems less real when it does not fit the image you've accumulated of it.

Debord points out that we compare every aspect of our lives to some imaginary ideal created by media. How you should look, how you should think, what you should eat. Take that already abstracted world and stick it onto a plane that is, by definition virtual, and the Spectacle has just been ²ed.

This is my desert island book, and it is available free in its entirety on the web.

christopher robbins blog: the rss feed has a new address

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