Laura DeNardis

Harvard Book Store welcomes author and globally-recognized internet governance scholar LAURA DENARDIS for a discussion of her book, The Internet in Everything: Freedom and Security in a World with No Off Switch.

About The Internet in Everything

The Internet has leapt from human-facing display screens into the material objects all around us. In this so-called Internet of Things—connecting everything from cars to cardiac monitors to home appliances—there is no longer a meaningful distinction between physical and virtual worlds. Everything is connected. The social and economic benefits are tremendous, but there is a downside: an outage in cyberspace can result not only in a loss of communication but also potentially a loss of life. Control of this infrastructure has become a proxy for political power, since countries can easily reach across borders to disrupt real-world systems.

Laura DeNardis argues that this diffusion of the Internet into the physical world radically escalates governance concerns around privacy, discrimination, human safety, democracy, and national security, and she offers new cyber-policy solutions. In her discussion, she makes visible the sinews of power already embedded in our technology and explores how hidden technical governance arrangements will become the constitution of our future.

Praise for The Internet in Everything

"This brilliant and essential book does nothing less than alter our paradigm for thinking about the internet—from communications and indirect control to communications and direct control. The internet is even more powerful—or more dangerous—than we think." —Anupam Chander, author of The Electronic Silk Road: How the Web Binds the World Together in Commerce 

"The Internet isn't just about communication anymore, Laura DeNardis explains in this important new book. Digital networks can now directly affect and manipulate our physical world—even our own bodies. And when the Internet is embedded in everything, everything becomes a potential object of surveillance and control. DeNardis shows us why we need a new politics of privacy and security as the Internet gets physical." —Jack M. Balkin, Yale Law School

“With more things than people connected to the Internet, we enter a cyber-physical world of opportunities and threats. Laura DeNardis is the perfect guide to this strange new world.” —Joseph S. Nye, Jr., author of The Future of Power