Through Glass, Darkly

In Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that the prevailing rhetoric of our experience of the Internet is a paranoid fantasy in which freedom is falsely conflated with control. Inasmuch as the Internet is the paradigmatic technology of our time, such “control-freedom” characterizes contemporary American culture more generally. Control-freedom is the freedom perpetuated by the Department of Homeland Security: “freedom as something one cannot not want” (274). Such freedom is paranoid in the Lacanian sense: the object interests us because it is the object of another’s desire (251). Real freedom, Chun insists, can never be reduced to control. Indeed, in exposing us to an alterity that threatens our own identity, the Internet offers us a valuable yet vulnerable freedom that is the opposite of control.

Chun argues that we experience the Internet as though we were omnipotent “users” in control of our actions. Microsoft invokes this user when it asks, in an advertising campaign for its web browser Explorer, “Where do you want to go today?” This invocation, says Chun, is in fact interpellation: the pronoun spuriously suggests that we are the owners of our Internet experience. But the very term “user,” with its resonances of addiction, suggests the fundamental ambivalence of agency. As Chun pithily puts it, “users are used as they use” (28). Even when effective, agency is always compromised; to be an agent is to act but also to be acted upon.

Central to Chun’s argument is the fact that our computers constantly “wander” without our knowledge. “Even when you are not ‘using,’ your computer sends and receives, stores and discards — that is, reads — packets, which mostly ask and respond to the question ‘Can you read me?’” (3–4). By emphasizing users’ autonomy and thus control, operating systems paper over this incessant chatter. We seem to be able to control our online interactions through mouse clicks and user commands, but these interactions are in fact governed by the structure of TCP/IP protocols and HTML script. (The “pop-up” screen is an everyday example of this lack of control.) When we are online we are circulated, even disseminated, without our knowledge. We can track this circulation by enabling a “packet sniffer” on our computers (a software program that analyzes local area network (LAN) traffic), but we cannot stop it. Nor, Chun adds, should we want to, for the Internet’s potential lies precisely in this vulnerability. The ideology of an active “user” not only discounts more ambivalent and commonplace behaviors, like “lurking,” but also obfuscates the fundamental impossibility of such lurking. There is no online interaction that does not leave traces. Accordingly, Chun urges us to understand agency as entailing dispossession as much as self-possession.

Chun’s book is distinguished by its facility with theory and technology alike. She convincingly relates the technical details of how the Internet works to larger theoretical issues. Methodologically, her work falls between the fields of visual cultural studies and media studies. In terms of networked telecommunication technology, the former emphasizes software and the latter hardware. Media studies argues that the distinction between software and hardware is only ideological, and thus false. Chun’s suggestion that the structure of technology, rather than our use of it, controls our Internet experience is thus in line with media studies. But Chun does not, like most writers within media studies, simply dismiss the persistent ideology of user control. She seeks to expose it by understanding it.

In the five chapters of her book, Chun offers critical readings of technology and its representations. The term “cyberspace,” she argues in Chapter 1, encourages us to think of fiber optic networks as spatial and navigable. This definition contributes to the fantasy of user control, as does the debate about online pornography, which she examines in Chapter 2. Chun argues that the structure of the Internet itself, rather than any notion of “bad” content and “bad” users, makes every online experience...