Hello, Futurographers,
It’s December and—you may have noticed—we’re not running a new Futurography course this month. Never fear, though: We’ll be back in January to celebrate the 199th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, looking at the ways the book has changed the ways we think about scientific advances. We’ll be featuring discussions of bioethics, the language of scientific innovation, and maybe even why our monsters have gotten so much sexier than they used to be. Stay tuned: It’ll be fun.
And that’s not all! In February, we’re planning our most practical unit yet—a series on self-defense against cybercrime. Then in March, we’ll be blasting back toward the stars with a course on the new space race. And in April we’ll be taking on synthetic biology. We hope you’ll continue to follow along.
In the meantime, this is the perfect moment to revisit our recently concluded course on internet governance. Here’s what we published in November:
- Introduction: Who, if anyone, runs the internet? And does it have anything to do with subterranean lizard people? Find out here.
- Cheat Sheet: What debates swirl around the problem of internet governance? What should you read if you want to get the details? All that and more.
- A (Largely) Jargon-Free Guide to ICANN: Find out how a key organization that allows us to use the internet works—and why it’s generated controversy.
- China’s Live-Streaming Revolution: Hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens watch online broadcasts, but political speech is largely absent from the medium.
- The Internet Debates Most Important to the Poor: In most of the world, net neutrality and ICANN are less important than infrastructure and free speech.
- You Are Helping Shape the Internet: The way we use the internet informs the ways the internet functions. We need to start acting accordingly.
- How the Rest of the World Feels About U.S. Dominance of the Internet: The United States exerts disproportionate influence over the workings of the internet, and the rest of the world doesn’t care for that at all.
- Google’s 21st Century Empire: Companies—not countries—increasingly exert disproportionate influence over the functioning of the internet.
- How the Internet Works in North Korea: The short answer is that it doesn’t work very well.
Once you’ve worked through all of that, test what you’ve learned against our quiz about internet governance. And then find out what your fellow Slate readers think in our write-up of our survey on the topic.
Setting up my VPN,
Jacob Brogan
for Future Tense
Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University.
