Tag: Internet

The Internet Isn’t The Last Haven Of Democracy.

On By WinstonIn Global Issues, Media, Pop Culture, Society, TechnologyLeave a comment

Courtesy of a raging bout of insomnia, I was browsing some back stories on Maclean’s.  That’s when this gem caught my eye.  On Aug 12th, Peter Nowak posted this article: “Governments Must Adapt To Internet, Not Other Way Around”.  According to Mr. Nowak, democracy “is the de facto model that almost every online operation works on”.

“The popular and good rise to the top… the bad and unpopular is ignored or voted down.” It seems he is equating popular with good.  Hardly a supportable position given the current popularity of reality tv and Jackass movies.  Rising to the top isn’t necessarily a sign of quality, only of popularity and people’s urge to part of the “In Crowd”.  The fact that something gets 80,000,000 hits doesn’t mean that it’s good, only that nobody wants to be the one that doesn’t know what everyone else is talking about.  Popular doesn’t equate to good, more often, only to easy.  Lolcats get more hits than ethical debates.  Contestants on reality shows garner more votes than elected officials.  Yeah, popular is a sure sign of quality.

His next little piece of genius involves praising the hacker collective known as Anonymous.  These self appointed judges/juries/executioners are defenders of openness and democracy according to this guy.  He indirectly praises them for their attack on Sony in retaliation for their lawsuit against the person who posted an illegal hack for the PS3.  Peter seems to believe that it was wrong of Sony to take legal steps to protect their intellectual property.  On the other hand, he is perfectly okay with Anonymous using illegal steps to punish them.  There are a couple of details he leaves out in his paean to digital frontier justice.  The takedown of Sony didn’t just affect “Sony”, it affected the employees, the gamers, the people whose jobs rely on those services being up and running.  It’s like Robin Hood burning peasant huts so they can’t afford to pay taxes to the sheriff.  It sounds good in theory, but the sheriff is still going to want his taxes.

Anonymous is also the group who took it upon themselves to post the home addresses of members of the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit police force.  This was in retaliation for BART shutting down cell towers to prevent protesters using them to organize.  Let’s deliberately endanger the live of the officers, their spouses and their children.  Way to pick your heroes Peter. If the persons responsible for that particular act are caught and convicted, they should be tossed into the deepest, darkest hole available and left there.  Pending further notice.

“The fundamental principles of the internet, therefore, are then same as democracy – each user is entitled to freedom and openness, so long as they don’t harm anyone else.”  Where he comes by these “fundamental principle” is never actually explained.  >he also doesn’t explain why Anonymous gets an exemption to the “don’t harm anyone else” part.  The fact is, the internet was created to share information.  Pure and simple.  Other people may have chosen to use it for their own purposes, but that doesn’t make it anything more or less than what it was designed to be.  Just because of bunch of spoiled children have decided that it’s easier to play “activist”as a way to act out when they don’t get their own way, doesn’t make them right.  When an allegedly serious journalist like Mr .Nowak buys into their fantasy, it just feeds into their bloated ego driven God complex.

His closing statement is the best illustration of his clearly delusional disconnect from the real world.  “Governments will inevitably have no choice but to acquiesce and adapt to what are ultimately basic human desires: to be open and free.  Otherwise, as advanced technologies make living in a virtual online world more realistic and palatable, people will inevitably abandon the real world and move into the ether permanently, leaving governments with no one to govern.”

If luck is with us, maybe Peter will be an early adopter of permanent virtualization.  Then any decent spam filter will keep his views in the junk folder where they belong.

Cheers, Winston

Internet Access: Basic Human Right?

On By WinstonIn Global Issues, SocietyLeave a comment

Earlier today I was browsing conversation threads on TED.com when the following subject caught my eye. “How we can use social media on a world scale to launch a global campaign to recognize Internet access as a basic human right?”

My initial response was, “Excuse me. Could you repeat that please.”. As I read through the thread, I was able to put the idea into context. This allowed me to give a bit more constructive thought to the question.

The idea is to enshrine Internet access in the U.N.Charter of Universal Rights. That seems harmless enough since nobody enforces that thing anyway. But let’s consider for a moment why that’s supposed to be a good thing.

If you are reading this, it’s a pretty safe bet that you already have internet access (and some spare time). You have the luxury of tapping into mind-bogglingly huge amounts of stuff. There are the writings of great thinkers, practical “how-to”s for almost anything, random Blogs by people you’ve never heard of (Hello I’m Win. Nice to meet you.), and a universe of other stuff. There are also the communication aspects of it. How great would it be if a doctor in a rural village in Ghana could get a realtime consult with a pediatrician in New York? What if a teacher in Kosovo could give their students a live connection to classrooms around the world to share and learn in a global context? Who knows what changes might come from such democratization of access and communication?

Which is what I want to know. Who can predict those changes. Obviously, those who want to lobby for this right believe they know the outcome. The fact is, people are notoriously lousy at predicting the impact of their actions. Even more so when personal beliefs or emotional attachments are at stake. It’s nice to think of a doctor in New York helping the doctor in Ghana save a child’s life. It’s not so nice to think about Al Shabab using the collaborative power of the internet to unify and better manage their operations allowing them to vastly increase the suffering in Somalia.

We all tend to focus on our own desired outcome. It is immensely difficult for us to honestly look at other options. We don’t want to acknowledge that there are as many opportunities for abuse as for use. That just because we have this thing does not mean that it is good for everyone else, or for us. Even those who have been exposed to the internet since it’s public inception struggle with the existence of this ethical and moral void in our midst.

The internet is not a discreet entity. It had no ethics or morality beyond those of it’s creators. There are technologies which allow people, organizations or governments to block undesirable content. There are also technologies to bypass those blocks. Censorship, whatever it’s motive, is at best a stopgap solution. In our society, we have had a process of of information exposure and even we are suffering “information overload”. How much more devastating the potential impact of the internet on a community without so much as a TV. What of the erosion of that culture by exposure to every other cultural expression in the world?

Would universal internet access be a blessing, or the single greatest act of cultural colonization since the Romans, the British or the Catholic Church?

Only time (and an unlikely transfer of technology) will tell.

Cheers, Winston