Assistant Professor of Communication, The University of Tulsa
Benjamin Peters is an author and media scholar on the faculty at the University of Tulsa and affiliated with the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. His latest book is How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (MIT, 2016). Educated on both coasts and oriented abroad, he lives in Tulsa.
Congrats to the author: what an exceptionally fascinating article! Bioethics often strike at the most interesting of areas, but the question of face transplants really does a number on where one thinks about the seat of the soul, or at least identity. Eager to read the book behind this article!
The Soviet InterNyet
Benjamin PetersHey folks, the author of the piece here. Just saw the piece go up and thought I’d include a quick provocation here. It’s not just that technology embeds social values, it’s that they can and will do so variously and differently over time. So instead of seeing computer networks as the onramp to electronic communism in the Soviet era (the book behind this article), and instead of seeing the internet today as the fast track to global networked capitalism (the conclusion to this article), I see networks techniques of all kinds (institutional, computer, etc.) as the historical means by which the social possibilities of the future will be shaped, but without determining one particular future. (...