Цитаты из книги Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age

For us, as the mystery of computers became the science of programming, many other mysteries seemed to vanish as well. For the person who understands code, the whole world reveals itself as a series of decisions made by planners and designers for how the rest of us should live. Not just computers, but everything from the way streets are organized in a town to the way election rules (are tilted for a purpose vote for any three candidates) begin to look like what they are: sets of rules developed to promote certain outcomes. Once the biases become apparent, anything becomes possible. The world and its many arbitrary systems can be hacked.

Value is still being extracted from the work -- it's just being taken from a different place in the production cycle, and not passed down to the creators themselves. Those of us who do create for a livingare told the free labor will garner us exposure necessary to get paid for something else we do -- like talks or television. Of course, the people hiring us to do those apprearances believe they should get us for free as well, because our live performances will help publicize our books and movies. And so it goes, all the while being characterized as the new openness of a digital society, when in fact we are less open to one another than we are to exploitation from the usual suspects at the top of the traditional food chain.

What all this abstraction does accomplish here on earth, however, is make everyone and everything more dependent on highly centralized standards. Instead of granting power to small businesses on the periphery, the net ends up granting even more authority to the central authorities, indexers, aggregators, and currencies through which all activity must pass. Without the search engine, we are lost. Without centrally directed domain name servers, the search engines are lost. Further, since digital content itself needs to be coded and decoded, it requires tremendous standardization from the outset. Far from liberating people and their ideas from hierarchies, the digital realm enforces central control on an entirely new level.