What is one to think when Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, eBay and AOL, in effect, sponsor an international protest over Internet copyright legislation which includes the first inkling of what Internet censorship would be like in the West—with the voluntary, self induced, 24-hour closure of the Wikipedia website? What instantaneously came to my mind is, “I want to take a look at this legislation and see why it threatens these media giants so, for them to take on an active, public lobbyist role.”
Then, upon going to the Wikipedia site, and finding what, to me, at the time, felt like a very insidious engineered, digital redirection to my local legislators’ email contact forms, I thought, “That is power. From providing an encyclopedic knowledge database to becoming the first actively engaged corporate revolutionary, is quite the radical jump.
“And somehow, it makes a mockery of my personal, individual right and responsibility to be in touch with, and engaged with, my representatives in this democratic country’s government on the issues of most concern to me.
“It feels very weird to me,” I continued musing, “that the process which began what we are now calling ‘The Arab Spring’—where the previously powerless took power and responsibility into their own hands, kicked out the despot and changed their own reality to boot—is turned on its head, and the powerful attempt to persuade us that they are us (i.e.., powerless) and therefore we must give them even more power by declaring ourselves powerless and following their whims willy-nilly to who knows where? More powerlessness … ? I know what it feels like,” I thought. “It feels like Carnation is running a campaign to stop consuming Libby’s evaporated milk because Libby’s hires child-labor. Where as you and I care about child-labor, Carnation—in this completely ridiculous and dramatized example—bloody well doesn’t. They’re a company. They run on the profit motive. They want to put a competitor out of business.
“Now I’m stuck,” thinks I. “Who is the competitor to these Internet behemoths in this case? Looking at the language of the legislation, everything came clear, it’s the people writing for them. How can a poor little Internet conglomerate make any money if they have to pay royalties to their content providers?
“And that,” thought I, “puts us back in the hot seat. We—you and I and all our friends, neighbors, acquaintances, relatives and other members of our species are, still, now, more powerful than Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, eBay and AOL all put together. The Internet remains the greatest tool for democracy ever invented, because it cannot be co-opted by the powerful. There’s always some hacker out there ready to bust open everything. Once it was Wikipedia itself. But, as the adage says, ‘Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. Wikipedia showed its true stripes. The only thing the powerful can do with the Internet is turn it off.
“Haha!” I giggled. “I’m going to go and look up the word ‘power’ in the pages of my Oxford English Dictionary. Then I think I’ll leaf through my thesaurus and see if I can come up with a suitable synonym for that word. After that I’ll look in the phone book and get some pizza delivered by telephoning a local store.
“I’ll show them all.
“Hahahahahahahahahah!”
With love and gratitude,
Paul
To Be Continued …
©2012, Paul Martin.
All rights reserved. May be used with attribution, but not for profit, without permission.
