Jonathan Zittrain‘s Future of the
Internet is based on a myth. Zittrain needs a foundational myth of the Internet
in order to praise it’s past openness and warn for a future lockdown of PCs and
mobile phones. From the ancient world of Theory we know why people invent
foundational myths: to protect those in power (in this case US-American IT
firms and their academic-military science structures that are losing global
hegemony). The Zittrain myth says that, compared to centralized,
content-controlled systems such as AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy, the
‘generative’ Internet of the late 1980s was an open network. But this was
simply not the case, it was closed to the general public. This foundational
myth is then used to warn the freedom-loving guys for the Downfall of
Civilization.
