After finishing the second chapter of Control and Freedom I was reminded of Wittgenstein’s comments about contradictions filling up all logical space but leaving no room for sensible meaning. Many conversations about Internet freedom, online privacy, reputation, etc. get trapped in an argument space that asserts control and freedom in opposition to each other. Asserting the two concepts as inextricably tied together gets the discussion bogged down in anxiety and confusion. In chapter 2 Chun sets up a strategy to penetrate the non-sense.
Think of the way one person approaches a porn site as a way to anonymously explore desire, and another person may approach the site as a marketing opportunity to exploit visitors for increased revenue. “Porn sites enable you to investigate your sexuality without fear of exposure or they track your every move. This opposition of control-freedom erases the constitutive vulnerability that enables communications.” (126) Authentic communication, the flow of ideas, involves various selves interpenetrating and affecting each other in ways that require vulnerability and risk. “Publicity” is a way to describe this enabling, but vulnerable state. Chun cites Thomas Keenan, quoting “Publicity tears us from our selves, exposes us to and involves us with others, denies us the security of that window behind which we might install ourselves to gaze.” (126)
True democracy requires subjects who are vulnerable to dangerous knowledge. “Resisting this vulnerability leads to the twinning of control and freedom—a twinning that depends on the conflation of information with knowledge and democracy with security.” (127)