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>> 83 3 From Computers to Cyberspace Virtual Reality, the Virtual Nation, and the CorpoNation In 1996, economist, techie, and writer Carl Malamud teamed up with one of the inventors of the internet, Vint Cerf, to set up the Internet World’s Fair.1 Called the “most ambitious undertaking on the Internet to date” by Newsweek magazine, this fair had over 5 million visitors from 172 countries, garnered over $100 million in contributions from a variety of industry and governmental sources, and received letters of support from a dozen governmental elites like Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin.2 The fair changed the infrastructure of the internet through its establishment of the “Internet Railroad,” a global networking backbone that used trans-oceanic cables to substantially increase connectivity around the world.3 Each participating country had its own “electronic theme pavilion” or website, which could feature events such as concerts and art exhibitions or contain information about the country, its government, and its people. But the fair was also open to individuals from any country who wanted to establish sites. As a result, some pavilions were more complex than others, ranging from the official German pavilion, which claimed to be “more than Wurst and Kraut” and featured web pages on many topics including German “Arts & Culture,” “Media,” “Science and Technology ,” and “The Virtual Pet Cemetery,” which was (and is) the world’s first “on-line pet mortuary.”4 Although the fair’s participants came from a variety of places, the entrance to the fair was an online “Central Park,” a digital recreation of the main park in New York City. As a transnational event, with material effects on the internet’s infrastructure, the 1996 Internet World’s Fair helped literally and figuratively to construct the internet as a global space. Paradoxically, however, imagined as an English-language, democratically constructed space entered through Central Park, the fair also helped literally and figuratively to configure the internet as an American space. This chapter investigates why this seemingly contradictory representation of the internet —as simultaneously global and American—made sense in the mid-1990s. 84 > 85 Kingdom). These state practices and culturally forged links between internet and nationalist American frontier narratives meant that cyberspace in the 1990s was cultivated as, and presumed to be, both a new frontier space and, simultaneously, an “American virtual nation.” This enactment of American imperial power over the medium was a “new type of colonization,” for “one way to colonize public terrain is to forget that it is a shared space, shared with others who may have different needs, different concerns, different expectations than oneself.”10 Major internet corporations participated in this Americanization by functioning as what I call “corpoNations,” corporations that embodied the nation and served as its cultural carriers into online spaces. For example, not only did America Online incorporate national identity in its name, but its software also served as a nationally bound entrance to the internet. As the internet became increasingly corporate in the mid-1990s—websites dedicated to commercial-use rose “from 4.6 percent of the total in 1993 to 50 percent by early 1996”—corpoNations functioned as stand-ins for the diminished state, even while they were imagined as drivers of globalization that undercut state power.11 W.W.W.: Icon of the New Global World Order The early 1990s was a period of increasing public attention to both the internet and “globalization.” Indeed, during this period, the internet became one prevailing metaphor through which news media, popular culture producers, academics, and policymakers understood globalization. Imagined by these sources as both a product and driver of globalization, internet technology itself was understood in similar utopian and dystopian terms as globalization . Although news media did not consistently feature the transnational character of the internet until the 1990s, the internet was in actuality transnational almost from the beginning. That is, while internet technology technically originated in the United States with the Department of Defense’s creation of ARPANET in 1969, during its debut at a conference in Washington , D.C. in 1972,12 Vint Cerf, one of the original designers of ARPANET, founded the International Networking Group (INWG) with representatives from England and France. This group wanted to create an “international network of networks,”13 and they did, indeed, accomplish this goal as early as 1974, when a satellite system linked computers in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, and the United States. Thus, only five years after its invention the internet was already a transnational (albeit...

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