Our great failing in thinking the network up to now was to presume that its actions were inherent and inevitable. By inherent, I mean the notion that they emerged, ex nihilo, from the things we created rather than involving our own actions as part of that co-creation. By inevitable, I mean a belief in a direct line of technological and historical progress that we are powerless to resist. Such a belief has been repeatedly attacked by thinkers in the social sciences and philosophy for decades, yet it has not been defeated. Rather, it has been reified into technology itself: into machines that
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