The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It

Zittrain's core concept is "generativity" — the capacity of a system to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences. The open PC and the early internet were generative; the iPhone and Facebook are not. He argued that the security problems of open systems would push users toward locked-down appliances, and that this trade of freedom for safety would quietly destroy the conditions that made digital innovation possible. Written in 2008, the book predicted the trajectory from open web to walled gardens with uncomfortable accuracy. Zittrain made the full text freely available through Harvard, consistent with his argument that knowledge infrastructure should remain open. The book is essential for understanding why the internet we have is not the internet that was built.