Before the emergence of internet governance bodies like the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), early network designers learned how to govern the internet in their work building the Domain Name System (DNS). Using original archival research, this article follows conversations among network designers in their daily struggle to keep the Advanced Research Project Agency Network (ARPANET) and early internet in working order. Drawing from social constructivism and path dependence theory, this history helps to conceive "internet governance" beyond its institutional focus, considering how the work of ordering the internet necessarily exceeds the parameters of governance authorities.

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Scholarship on digital identity has historically reflected a Protean discourse, framing arguments in terms of fluidity and constraint. After explicating the Protean discourse that has framed critical approaches to digital identity, this article exposes how the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), in order to justify its centralized authority of the Domain Name System, itself mobilizes a Protean discourse, representing digital identity as a finite supply of water in need of proper management. From its formation in 1998 until 2009, when the US Department of Commerce effectively released the corporation from its official supervision, ICANN assembled a regime for the management of digital identity, which is itself an infrastructure for a global identity industry. By adopting an infrastructural disposition, this article situates global Internet governance in relation to the academic corpus on digital identity, interrogating the discursive conditions by which we have come to understand ourselves in relation to the Internet’s most basic addressing schema, the enclosures within which all virtual communities congregate.

La Noire de …, widely considered black Africas first independent feature film, is about a womans recognition of the duplicitous nature of neocolonial subjectivity, a duplicity that Sembene himself recognized during the production of the film. Historically, French cinematographic institutions, implanted in Senegal in order to facilitate African film-making, operated within a circular logic that required Sembene to be both French and Senegalese. Aesthetically, Sembene impugns this circular logic through his ironic use of focalization, montage and mise-en-scène, offering a critique not only of French neocolonialism, but also of assimilationist policies of the early Senegalese government. The result of such assimilationist collusion is the construction of a both/and existence, whereby nations subject to history are perceived as apart from time and space, and garner the qualities of myth, blinding both colonizer and colonized to the dialectical process responsible for such a fractured reality. In La Noire de … Sembene develops a spatiotemporal aesthetics of neocolonialism that acts as the primary structural principle of the film and reveals the contradictory existence of the neocolonial subject.

This article examines a central aspect of bookishness in the digital age, wherein the coexistence of paper codices along with their electronic counterparts fosters the interaction of life and code, as code is the inscription of life, and life the instantiation of code. Ark Codex ± 0 exemplifies this feedback loop. Ark Codex ± 0 traces the development of biological organisms through scientific notation, language and math, all while illustrating a bloody collage of the biblical myth. The Calamari Press, its vanity publisher, situates itself as a codex-maker in a time of digital production by privileging the book form over the digital file, while simultaneously fostering a print culture through digital paratexts, such as videos of the production process, on its website. While you can purchase the book for $40 on the Calamari site, a pdf of Ark Codex ± 0 is also offered at a ‘pay what you want rate’. Ark Codex ± 0 is a remix with multiple channels of distribution, a text you encounter in multiple ways. This article argues that the new environment of print culture elicits not only the act of reading, but an embodied encounter with the text both in vivo and in silico, the vital forms of bookwork in the digital age.