The Digital Frontier: Infrastructures of Control on the Global Web

The global web andits digital ecosystem can be seen as tools of emancipation, communication, andspreading knowledge or as means of control, fueled by capitalism, surveillance,and geopolitics.

The Digital Frontierinterrogates the world wide web and the digital ecosystem it has spawned toreveal how their conventions, protocols, standards, and algorithmic regulationsrepresent a novel form of global power. Sangeet Kumar shows the operation of thispower through the web's "infrastructures of control" visible at siteswhere the universalizing imperatives of the web run up against local values,norms, and cultures. These include how the idea of the "global commongood" is used as a ruse by digital oligopolies to expand their privateenclosures, how seemingly collaborative spaces can simultaneously beexclusionary as they regulate legitimate knowledge, how selfhood is beingredefined online along Eurocentric ideals, and how the web's political challengeis felt differentially by sovereign nation states.

In analyzing this new modality of cultural power in theglobal digital ecosystem, The Digital Frontier is an important read forscholars, activists, academics and students inspired by the utopian dream of atruly representative global digital network.