THE DARK PATH THE INTERNET HAS TAKEN
I think somewhere along the line back there we passed an invisible border whilst living on the internet. Maybe someone will pinpoint where it all began in hindsight, but the Internet as I knew it from 1996-2003 was a free country. It was it's own country without laws, owned by nobody outside it, but owned by every nationality, and now it's not.
Someone on the outside decided they could 'regulate' the internet - probably westerners in America and the UK who thought that they 'owned it', this space where the developed world can meet, that isn't even really a physical, tangible place. It's like how I imagine Heaven (I don't believe in an actual Heaven), but this strange dimension, removed from the world, yet overlayed on top of it and with little paths of access, or windows to look at it, called computers.
Anyway. Some things I find distressing:
1. Copyright laws,
2. people claiming 'Tweets' are some form of public speaking that you can be jailed for if you say something wrong (but who governs what 'words' are the wrong ones? - hence the removal of free speech),
3. People saying Anonymity online is wrong, and I think the government are even now trying to sneakily find ways to make nobody online allowed to be Anonymous. This is so wrong, I have lived my life on the web using Pseudonyms / Web nicks/Aliases, as have many others. Actually, I think it was only Facebook that popularised the idea of giving your full name out online, instead of using your Web name. So this must partly be Facebooks fault. The other blame may fall on Formspring & Tumblr, wherein you have question boxes that give you the option to 'Respond with your Web Alias OR respond Anonymously'. And people who believe in cyber-bullying have said that being 'Anonymous' allows you to say what you want. Of course you can, just like wearing a mask in a theatre production. That doesn't mean we should CONFISCATE the masks. Anonymity is also a way the victims of attacks can protect themselves from harm, and people don't seem to realise this.
4. Today I saw also that the popular web-browser add-on 'Adblocker' is being demonised by some people saying 'blocking ads is theft' ....see here: [link]
My thoughts on this article: This is wrong, to me. Not allowing people to stop this horrifyingly intrusive practice from entering their lives, and people on the other end thinking it totally works and that they can't make money without using it on us. I'd like to believe people can make money if they wish to, without forcing products and logos down our throats and into our minds, daily.
People saying 'Blocking Adverts is theft' this is just nonsense! I disagree completely. Adverts are invasive, privacy destroying horrible little things and the Internet is starting to become so full of such fake, meaningless laws, that I can see masses of people would start going to jail for nothing. I do not like to see this. If we don't want Ads in our life that should be a fair and reasonable right.
Goddamnit they're gonna make me into a campaigner before long. Advert invasiveness has gotten so bad. I don't care who uses it at work, it's wrong and I want it illegalized. I do use AdBlocker. I disagree completely that Blocking Adverts is Theft.
The reason Youtube was a good replacement for TV was
a) wider variety of non-company-made content
b) there USED TO BE no adverts
c) real choice.
Sorry for the rants. I am angry that our rights/personal freedom/freedom of the internet has been abused the last 15 years. It's not better.
So yeah I feel angry about this. It seems every week I am seeing a new story about how people are trying to control, regulate, and abuse the internet making it less and less of a free country all the time.
What I find most disturbing is the people taking charges/being jailed for saying words and having views on the internet. Anything said online that doesn't suit the ideas of government/businesses with power/majority public view (minority thoughts, which to be represent good people) gets constrained and in the end attacked by law. Law on the internet has become a frightening thing to me. I didn't think I lived in the sort of society where if you said something people disagreed with, you'd be imprisoned, but now I have an extreme worry that things I say or do online that are 'normal' will be suddenly covered by a newly invented criminal act of somesort that I know nothing about!
It seems like they are inventing new laws everyday under our noses, in an attempt to 'regulate the internet' because they can't understand it, and when someone swears or confesses a view that doesn't fit in with their lifestyle (which, with all humans being unique to each other due to our frames of reference, we all have) on a comment board or post, the typically offended rich people with power attack the individual they don't understand by finding a law that says what they've done is wrong. Eventually there's going to be plenty to choose from, a bit like choosing the right tool for the job. The job of getting rid of people they find offensive, who are probably just innocent.
Now I wanna be able to talk freely, but I can't. Not on the internet, because I know if a person who makes laws thinks my views are dark or unpatriotic they might put me in a box. A prison cell. Take away my freedom. Because I used my free speech, but they've found a way to illegalize free speech without explicitly telling us they've done it.
Is it even safe to use Twitter without moderating your thoughts? I worry that it isn't, so I have to present 1/4 of myself. I've always used Twitter as a 'Thought-dump'. Now I see the governments and the people who make the laws think Twitter isn't the inside of a brain (as it is to me) but more like the equivalent of standing on a soapbox in a crowded street doing public speaking.
This distinction between Twitter being the inside of my head (to me) and the outside using projected voice (to them) is worrying. Because now not only are they beginning to regulate our free speech, they are beginning to regulate (and invent laws for) my thoughts.
With this in mind, I can't look forward to neuroscience.
I think this is closer to what I had in mind for the fiction book I was almost going to write called 'A Thought-War Is Coming.' ...it's like an exploration of a world at war not using weapons, but mind-invasion.
Still not sure whether I should do some of this for NaNoWriMo 2012 this November.
It seems relevant, but I can never tell which people think like I do about this stuff.
Rant over. For now.
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