Quinn Norton

Encyclopedias, Lolcats, and Revolutions… and other Strange Consequences of an Open and Free Internet

Quinn Norton’s keynote speech will be delivered on Tuesday 9 July 2013 at 10.30am (Auditorium)


Collaborative Notes: International Keynote – Technology Journalist & Blogger Quinn Norton

“From Anonymous to Open Source, Wikipedia to Occupy Wall Street, online communities are using the open internet to make unpredictable and powerful projects and movements. Our tools have always made us strange animals, but the networks that are crawling over the surface of the world make our communities strange, too. We form collectives that act more like nature than nation-states, and often do things that are illegible to traditional power and organizations.

“Our communities grow out of the internet and mobile telephony, they use openness and communication to move fast in unexplored directions, and they are invariably revolutionary and disruptive in nature. People are themselves as part of collectives, but also part of something larger, stranger, and new in the world. They learn differently, build strong and
weak ties differently, and coordinate in powerful and fast ways. Net collectives reverse our assumptions on how people act together: they publish, then select. They act with agency at once, and social capital comes later. On the net, dissent is often integral to overall stability.

“This talk will explore how the tools hackers have built are creating a new kind of unintended cyborg. Instead of part human, part machine, the next great cyborg to walk on the Earth is part community, part network.”

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