Browsing by Author "Kennedy, Christopher"

The suspicion that the advent of the internet marks some sort of qualitative change in the development of the human affairs motivates much diagnosis but less instruction about the contemporary political moment. Are there normative implications to recent advances in information technology? This dissertation examines three political conflicts over the use of the internet in a liberal democratic society. Each controversy reflects a basic disagreement about the appropriate domain of the public sphere: whether to accommodate electronic forms of civil disobedience, to treat digital information as intellectual property, or to sanction the act of leaking. Each chapter of the dissertation uses the work and writings of a political activist for insight into competing claims over what should count as a use or abuse or new technology. Electronic methods of political protest clarify an important feature of the justification of civil disobedience that scholars should take into consideration even in the more traditional circumstances in which it is practiced. Current and historical controversies surrounding the ethics of leaking call into question who should have the authority to decide what the public has the right to know. And the free software movement challenges long-standing assumptions about the justification of intellectual property and the public interest bargain at the heart of it. Together, these cases illustrates the normative implications to recent advances in information technology.