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As our society continues to increase its demands on energy consumption and consumer goods, we are likely to attain a higher standard of living while allowing further deterioration of the environment to occur. Today, we are often told, we live not simply in an age of information, but in an age of excessive information. The amount and availability of information seem to be increasing at an exponential rate. We feel that our entire world is …

…be harnessed, its movements channeled, its resources exploited. The metaphors involved here are extremely similar to those used by colonialism; they presume a need to survey and subdue, to catalogue and contain, and, ultimately, to turn to profitable use, those areas that are seen as wild, chaotic, and other. Commercializing the Internet, then, is precisely a matter of trying to know and control, to colonize and master, that whi ch is seen as culturally other.