The reason that’s important is because if we are here today for one reason at least that we’re here today is that it seems like 2012 has been the year in which the network has come of age politically between the SOPA PIPA battle at the beginning of the year after and its failure, let alone the prior year in the Arab spring where it’s more ambiguous how much was played by the network and how much was played by existing social networks.

But this was really the year of network politics fighting for itself. And so this moment requires that we understand not only what networks are but also what networks are against and what networks are threatened by. And that’s why I wanted this particularly stark definition between twentieth and twenty-first century, or industrial hierarchical and network. Yochai Benkler

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