The Explosion of Network Techniques and the Myth of the Network between Science and Democracy. Legal Implications
The Explosion of Network Techniques and the Myth of the Network between Science and Democracy. Legal Implications

Summary/Abstract: The network has become a dominant form of contemporary thought, its constitutive metaphor reinvented during the explosion of networked techniques - the Internet and planetary telecommunications networks. It seems to draw the invisible infrastructure of contemporary society. The figure of the network tends to define the ways in which thought works, being ubiquitous in all disciplines, from biology to sociology, from law to computer science, etc., for the hidden structure of the complexity of today's society is the network that dominates and shapes it. The network itself produces social change, being conceived as a technique that provides connection and as a political-moral operator that provides meaning and is identified with a social and democratic revolution. In contemporary society everything is networked, from transport to energy, from telecommunications to information technology, even human relations have become 'networks'. The network, as the explanatory structure of the contemporary capitalist system, constitutes the 'new morphology of our societies', converging towards a 'meta-network of capitals', as the new figure of power, with the whole planet caught in its net, leading to the suppression of state control over society and the economy and the destruction of the sovereign nation state through the destruction of hierarchies.

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