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