I've been thinking about starting a youtube channel lately and posting videos etc. for a while now, and the desire to do this has recently been reignited.
This whole SOPA thing, I confess, has got me somewhat worried. My original reaction was, holy fuck, this is going ruin the internet! I was starting to think that things would eventually be so bad and so crippled here in cyberspace, that it wouldn't even be worth going on any more, which led me to start thinking, well, I suppose I'll just have to write the whole thing off and concentrating on other things. I mean, if laws like that start getting passed, there's not a lot we can do about it, so we should probably just accept defeat...
Then I thought, you know what? Fuck that. When it comes to the forward motion of humanity on the whole, the internet is the most important and amazing thing that has ever happened. The potential for open and free communication on here is astounding. It has led to an openness across the globe that nothing has ever come close to achieving. When I write something on here, and someone from say, America, reads it, or someone from Portugal, or someone New Zealand etc. that's me speaking DIRECTLY to you. That's person to person, with no middle man. Gone are the days when the governments really controlled global communication. My granddad would never in his life, have spoken to an American, or been anywhere near so easily able to if he wanted. Me? I can just pop on here and send someone a message.
Before, the only news anyone could get was from the mass media, who are controlled by politicians and corporations and so, cannot be trusted to be impartial, but with the internet, I could potentially get the true news stories, as they are happening, from someone who is actually there. There is power there, and it's OURS and the powers that be don't like it.
Something like SOPA is not about piracy, but is instead a blatant attempt at hamstringing communication. They've latched onto this piracy idea so they could attempt to give themselves some sort of moral high ground, and they could make the laws so vague that they could potentially target any online threat to them that appears, under the guise of combating piracy, because those copyright laws are actually A LOT more broad and limiting than a lot of people might realise.
They could look at some news website that's speaking out about their unlawful invasion of some foreign country and say "Oh look, they posted a picture there and there's a coca-cola logo in it! Looks like we have to shut down the whole site!". Before, because they were in control of it all, they could say "Don't worry folks, everything's fine in the world, nothings going on in Syria, just go back to your American X Factor" (to kind of paraphrase a Bill Hicks bit there) but now, they are not in control. Communication is so open and fast right now, that someone who was actually there could just tweet "Shit is getting real over here, guys, something's going on" and immediately, word is out. Of course, the powers don't want this.
In short, the potential for calling out bullshit, especially with governments etc. is HUGE now. We have more power now than ever before an they're trying to take it from us.
But hope is not lost. They thought they could just say "Yeah, we're going after pirates! We're the good guys!" and we'd all cheer and not notice what they were really trying to do, but what happened was different. Our eyes are more open than they ever knew, and people rose up in force against them.
This tells me that now, it's more important than ever for us to keep these lines of communication open. We really need to fight for our selves here, but I confess, I don't really know how. All I can think of is to put more effort into blogs like this, and to put myself out there more. I really want to try harder to keep talking to people and to keep us all linked.
We need to keep this alive.
This whole SOPA thing, I confess, has got me somewhat worried. My original reaction was, holy fuck, this is going ruin the internet! I was starting to think that things would eventually be so bad and so crippled here in cyberspace, that it wouldn't even be worth going on any more, which led me to start thinking, well, I suppose I'll just have to write the whole thing off and concentrating on other things. I mean, if laws like that start getting passed, there's not a lot we can do about it, so we should probably just accept defeat...
Then I thought, you know what? Fuck that. When it comes to the forward motion of humanity on the whole, the internet is the most important and amazing thing that has ever happened. The potential for open and free communication on here is astounding. It has led to an openness across the globe that nothing has ever come close to achieving. When I write something on here, and someone from say, America, reads it, or someone from Portugal, or someone New Zealand etc. that's me speaking DIRECTLY to you. That's person to person, with no middle man. Gone are the days when the governments really controlled global communication. My granddad would never in his life, have spoken to an American, or been anywhere near so easily able to if he wanted. Me? I can just pop on here and send someone a message.
Before, the only news anyone could get was from the mass media, who are controlled by politicians and corporations and so, cannot be trusted to be impartial, but with the internet, I could potentially get the true news stories, as they are happening, from someone who is actually there. There is power there, and it's OURS and the powers that be don't like it.
Something like SOPA is not about piracy, but is instead a blatant attempt at hamstringing communication. They've latched onto this piracy idea so they could attempt to give themselves some sort of moral high ground, and they could make the laws so vague that they could potentially target any online threat to them that appears, under the guise of combating piracy, because those copyright laws are actually A LOT more broad and limiting than a lot of people might realise.
They could look at some news website that's speaking out about their unlawful invasion of some foreign country and say "Oh look, they posted a picture there and there's a coca-cola logo in it! Looks like we have to shut down the whole site!". Before, because they were in control of it all, they could say "Don't worry folks, everything's fine in the world, nothings going on in Syria, just go back to your American X Factor" (to kind of paraphrase a Bill Hicks bit there) but now, they are not in control. Communication is so open and fast right now, that someone who was actually there could just tweet "Shit is getting real over here, guys, something's going on" and immediately, word is out. Of course, the powers don't want this.
In short, the potential for calling out bullshit, especially with governments etc. is HUGE now. We have more power now than ever before an they're trying to take it from us.
But hope is not lost. They thought they could just say "Yeah, we're going after pirates! We're the good guys!" and we'd all cheer and not notice what they were really trying to do, but what happened was different. Our eyes are more open than they ever knew, and people rose up in force against them.
This tells me that now, it's more important than ever for us to keep these lines of communication open. We really need to fight for our selves here, but I confess, I don't really know how. All I can think of is to put more effort into blogs like this, and to put myself out there more. I really want to try harder to keep talking to people and to keep us all linked.
We need to keep this alive.