Table Of ContentC o n t ro l a n d F re e d o m
C o n t ro l a n d F re e d o m
Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
TheMITPress Cambridge,Massachusetts London,England
(2006MassachusettsInstituteofTechnology
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ThisbookwassetinJansonandRotisSemiSanson3B2byAscoTypesetters,
HongKong.PrintedandboundintheUnitedStatesofAmerica.
LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
Chun,WendyHuiKyong,1969–
Controlandfreedom:powerandparanoiaintheageoffiberoptics/by
WendyHuiKyongChun.
p. cm.
Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
ISBN0-262-03332-1(hc:alk.paper)
1.Opticalcommunications. 2.Fiberoptics. 3.Technologyand
civilization. I.Title.
TK5103.59.C58 2005
0
303.48 33—dc22 2004061362
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Interlude 31
1 Why Cyberspace? 37
2 Screening Pornography 77
3 Scenes ofEmpowerment 129
4 Orientingthe Future 171
5 Control and Freedom 247
Epilogue 299
References 303
Index 327
Preface
During the Afghanistan War, the second Gulf War, and the subsequent
occupation of Iraq, T-shirts, bumper stickers, and politicians reminded
us, ‘‘Freedom is not free.’’ This phrase, engraved on the Korean War
Memorial in Washington, D.C., would seem simply to say that freedom
comes at the cost of soldiers’ lives and civilian sacrifices. Freedom is not
without cost; someone has to pay a price. This phrase, however, is open
to another reading: when freedom is conflated with security, freedom
loses its meaning—freedom is no longer free. If freedom is reduced to a
gated community writ large or becomes the ideological watchword of a
nationalsecuritystate,thenitcanturnintonothingmorethanthepartner
of, or the alibi for, control. The very phrase ‘‘freedom is not free’’ can
make freedom unfree when it calls on people to accept unfreedom as the
cost offreedom. Free can also mean priceless, a gift. In English, the word
free stems from the Sanskrit word for ‘‘dear’’ or ‘‘beloved.’’ The phrase
‘‘freedom is not free’’ should never make sense, for what is free should
never be devalued. The value of freedom underlined by its etymology is
erased when we shift the emphasis away from the action of giving some-
thing freely—not in return for something else—to the economism or
opportunismofarecipient,lookingforabargain,whorefusestoacknowl-
edgethisliberalityandthusliterallycheapensthis act.Thischeapeningof
freedom is crucial to the conflation of control with freedom.
Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics
examines ‘‘freedom’’ through the rubric of the Internet, more specifically,
through its emergence as a mass medium. Emphasizing the roles of sexu-
ality and race, this book traces the ways in which a technology, which
thrives on control, has been accepted, however briefly, as a mass medium
of freedom. Moving from utopian narratives about cyberspace to the
| viii |
| underlying hardware the Internet seeks to obscure (and about which we
e
ac oftenforget),ittracesthestructuringparadoxofinformationandcommu-
ef
Pr nications: without control technologies, no freedom (of choice or move-
ment). But the linkage is not an identity: freedom is not the same thing
as control. Their conflation is a response to the failures of both liberty
and discipline and marks a significant shift in the apparatuses of power: it
is aresponse to theend oftheColdWar andto thesuccesses andfailures
ofcontainment(inPaulEdwards’swords,its‘‘closedworld’’).Thisconfla-
tion offreedom withcontrol alsoproducesandisproducedbyparanoia,a
paranoia that stems from the attempt to solve political problems techno-
logically. Tobe paranoid isto think like a machine.
In this book, I do not condemn the Internet—if anything, I hold it
dear. Liking it or hating it, as such, is as pointless as being ‘‘optimistic’’
or ‘‘pessimistic’’ about its future. Rather, what we need is a serious en-
gagement with the ways in which the Internet enables communications
between humans and machines, enables—and stems from—a freedom
that cannot be controlled. Because freedom is a fact we all share, we
have decisions to make: freedom is not the result of our decisions, but
rather, as Friedrich Schelling and Jean Luc Nancy have argued, what
makes our decisions possible. This freedom is not inherently good, but
entails a decision for ‘‘good’’—habitation and limitation—or for ‘‘evil’’—
destruction. The gaps within technological control, the differences
betweentechnological controlanditsrhetoricalcounterpart,andtechnol-
ogy’s constant failures mean that our control systems can never entirely
make these decisionsfor us.
Fiber-optic networks, this book argues, enable communications that
physically instantiate and thus shatter enlightenment; they also link to-
gether disparate locations that only sometimes communicate. We must
take seriously the vulnerability that comes with communications—not so
that we simply condemn or accept all vulnerability without question but
so that we might work together to create vulnerable systems with which
we canlive.
Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to all those who have read and sponsored various parts
ofthisbook.IowespecialthankstoDianaFussandThomasKeenan,who
oversaw this project in its first incarnations so many years and revisions
ago; to Bruce Simon, who read and re-read numerous early drafts; to
RichardDienst,WolfgangErnst,N.KatherineHayles,PeterKrapp,Alan
Liu,GeertLovink,TimothyMurray,EllenRooney,andElizabethWeed,
who generously read and commented on later versions of the manuscript;
and to Rey Chow, Laura Chrisman, James Der Derian, Madhu Dubey,
Amy Kapcynski, Rachel Lee, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Margaret Morse, Lisa
Nakamura, Julie Levin Russo, Marc Steinberg, Jeffrey Tucker, and Sau-
ling Wong, who all read and offered critiques of portions of it. Their
comments have immeasurably improved this book. I have learned much
and received great support from my colleagues in the Department of
Modern Culture and Media: Nancy Armstrong, Rey Chow, Tony Cokes,
Mary Ann Doane, Lynne Joyrich, Roger Mayer, Ellen Rooney, Phil
Rosen, Michael Silverman, Len Tennenhouse, and Leslie Thornton;
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has been an invaluable teacher. Liz Canner,
Chris Csikszentmihalyi, Arindam Dutta, Maria Fernandez, and Natalie
Jeremijenko are all fellow travelers, to whom I owe inspiration and good
cheer. I am also grateful to my wonderful research assistants, Julie Levin
Russo, Melanie Kohnen, Yumi Lee, and Michelle Higa, to Joy Simon,
who sent me many pertinent articles early on, to Liza Hebert and Susan
McNeil (the heart and soul of MCM), as well as the fantastic editorial
machineatMIT:DougSery,ValerieGeary,andDeborahCantor-Adams.
Martha Fieltsch’s and Natalka Migus’s unfailing friendship kept me sane
duringtheprocessofwriting.Withouttheloveandsupportofmypartner
Paul Moorcroft, this book would not have beenpossible.
| x |
| This book is dedicated to my parents Yeong Shik Chun and Soon Jom
ents Chun, in love andrespect.
m
g
d
e
wl
o Research for this book was supported by grants, a fellowship and leave
n
k
Ac from Brown University (in particular a Henry Merritt Wriston Fellow-
ship)—I am grateful to Brown University for its financial and academic
support. A fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at
Harvard University was crucial to completing the manuscript; fellowships
from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada) and
PrincetonUniversitywerecrucialtoitscommencement.Iamalsograteful
to Matt Mahurinfor freely allowing me to reprint his photographs.
A portion of the introduction has appeared in ‘‘Human-Mediated-
Communications,’’ Reality/Simulacra/Artificial: Ontologies of Postmodernity,
inEnglishandPortuguese,ed.EnriqueLarreta(RiodeJaneiro:Universi-
dade Candido Mendes, 2003); and a portion of chapter 1 as ‘‘Othering
Space’’ Visual Culture Reader 2.0, ed. Nick Mirzoeff (New York: Rout-
ledge 2003)—both in altered form. An early draft of chapter 3 was pub-
lished as ‘‘Scenes of Empowerment: Virtual Racial Diversity and Digital
Divides’’ New Formations 45 (winter 2001); and an early, condensed ver-
sionofchapter4in‘‘OrientingOrientalism,orHowtoMapCyberspace,’’
Asian American.net, eds. Rachel Lee and Sau-ling Wong (New York:
Routledge 2003).
C o n t ro l a n d F re e d o m
INTRODUCTION
Wehavelivedin,andstilllivein,excitingtimes,fromthefalloftheBerlin
wall to the heady days of the dot-com era, from the events of September
11, 2001, to the ongoing turmoil in geopolitical relations. All these events
have been linked to freedom: the triumph of the Free World, the free
market, and the free circulation of information; threats to freedom from
abroad, and the U.S. mission to spread democracy and freedom. All these
eventshavealsobeenlinkedtotechnologyandnetworks:EasternEurope’s
collapse has been attributed to computer technology and broadcast/
satellite television; terrorist networks turn everyday technologies like air-
planes and cell phones into weapons; the U.S. military’s and intelligence
agencies’ control and communications networks are without rival, if not
withoutfault.Butwhatdoesitmeantoattributesuchcausalitytotechnol-
ogyandlink freedomto what are essentially control technologies?
Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics
responds to this question by revealing how power now operates through
the coupling of control and freedom. Although ideologies and practices
of freedom and control are not new, the coupling of these terms is
uniquely tied to information technology and our current political situa-
tion. Control-freedom, which is intimately experienced as changes in
sexuality and race, is a reaction to the increasing privatization of net-
works, public services and space, and to the corresponding encroachment
ofpublicity andparanoiaintoeverydaylife.TheendoftheColdWarhas
not dispelled paranoia but rather spread it everywhere: invisibility and
uncertainty—of the enemy, of technology—has invalidated deterrence
and moved paranoia from the pathological to the logical. This twinning
of control and freedom subverts the promise offreedom, turning it from
a force that simultaneously breaks bonds and makes relation possible to
