Now Would Not Be The Time To Celebrate or Relax.

As last week progressed to its conclusion the pressures on Congress from the public and from actual Internet operators to drop any and all so-called internet piracy legislation became too great for them to withstand. SOPA and PIPA as constructed were too little too late. Even the tempting bribes from Wall Street and Hollywood were not enough to overcome their fear of an enraged public and a new and powerful free press. Any court rulings that bloggers are not “real” journalist were exposed as acts of desperation, empty of any real authority and outside the realities of the Internet world.


The Justice Department’s move at the end of the week to take down a major filesharing operation brought a swift reaction from Anonymous and legions of other hackers that shut down entertainment and government webs sites with denial of service attacks. The word no doubt came down from the corporations and the bureaucracy that they could not withstand the attacks, and the call to retreat was sounded. The Feds and their bureaucrats have clearly underestimated how much people love the Internet and the free flow of information it provides that is outside the ability of government and the major media corporations to control. Sure there are a lot of kooky conspiracy theories out there and there will always be those who fall for them. Just look at government and media propaganda, it flourishes and survives in the exact same way. All the suckers notwithstanding there are a lot more people out there with a lot more healthy skepticism and plain old common sense than they get credit for who can see past the bunkum whatever the source.

And that is the point. The numbers of people are growing who no longer are willing to be spoon fed crap, who have come to the realization that there is a truth, a reality, beyond that of government and media managed propaganda. Concurrent with this growth in numbers is a growing realization that government is not the beneficent father it would have us believe it is. SOPA and PIPA can then in fact be seen for what they were, desperate attempts to stem this rising tide.

The words of Thomas Jefferson have come back to haunt the powers that be; “When government fears the people you have liberty, when the people fear the government you have tyranny.”

This is not to say that the power or determination of the statists has been broken. The power of the Internet may have already grown to large for the cage the government wanted to put it in. Yet have no doubt, like in a bad Hollywood movie, the monster will rise from its grave and government will try to construct a newer and bigger cage and find a more surreptitious way of putting it in place. The corruption of the corporatist state has become absolute. It will not simply give up to the “will of the people,” like a wounded animal it will strike back in some new more vicious totalitarian way. A new or manufactured crisis will come along demonstrating the need to bring “certain elements” under control for reasons of “state security” and if the 1st Amendment and freedom of expression become collateral damage well that’s just too bad. It will all be for our own good and protection of course.

Perhaps than it is true that there are two types of people in the world, the ones who want to be left alone to pursue there own happiness free of interference from others and government and those sociopaths who see controlling others and restricting their freedoms as the path to power and wealth. Hopefully as long as the desire for freedom remains a part of our genetic makeup and as long as there are a lot more of the former (and at least a few of them willing to put up the good fight) than the latter, then there is still hope that the next generation will know the freedoms we and past generations have known and in many cases fought to pass on to them.