Questions of access are central to the notions of the Internet as a new space of freedom that became popular with the emergence of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s and have continued to flourish with Web 2.0 and beyond. The Chinese government is criticised when it censors certain websites and people celebrate worldwide when activists in the Middle East can share their videos via social platforms like Facebook. Furthermore, most people will probably agree that online shopping is not only cheaper but also easier than physically going to the shopping mall. Armed citizen (originally a website) is a series of images of handguns that can be bought online like the millions of other consumer goods the Internet offers the common user. The images give no information about the guns, the type, the price, or where they can be bought but simply present them one after the other as objects of desire made available by the new economy of digitalised networked transactions. Hence, the “armed citizens” that the title refers to are, for whatever reason they buy the guns, themselves the products of the commercial logic embedded in contemporary access culture.

Image: Daniel G. Andujar /Technologies To The People