You digital vassals are free to go. There are no dangers in the outer world to seek protection against by a powerful lord.

No one will burn your house if you leave Facebook. Your crops won’t be devastated if you don’t use Google. Your country won’t be conquered if your contacts are not kept in iCloud. You are there because it is convenient for you, nothing else. Billions of people are not on Facebook, billions more use Google for search without creating account. Maybe your life is a little bit more enjoyable with online presence, but it’s definitely not a question of survival.

Syrian insurgents unite using Facebook, the government hunts them down using Facebook. You think it would’ve been harder for the government to eavesdrop on their phone lines? Those who use Facebook for that don’t seem to care much. And those who do, they use Tor or i2p, and positively no government can do anything without it. Anything!

Thanks to the internet, you can raise fund to topple your government, selling drugs for bitcoins and buying weapons for bitcoins on Silk Road or whatever black market succeeds it, with no conceivable risk, now how feudal is that? The point of that is while the technology empowers people, and it empowers corporations, but people still win by comparison.

The beauty of digital age is that it can answer your challenge. If you are concerned about privacy, it is extremely easy to become absolutely anonymous. Why Zimmerman was persecuted by the U.S. government so fervently — they saw it coming, they are not dumb. And now it’s here.

The Internet and the abstraction that it provides is FAR greater than any particular implementation or manifestation of it. No matter what “apps” may dominate “mind-share”, the power of the internet allows usage to remain unrestricted elsewhere with very little drop in performance or capability.

P2P apps still have promise to re-invent the internet and the power of it allows it to be transformed in short order: as soon as the “killer app” arrives. The real question is: Why did everybody settle for mediocrity when they could have a free culture and balanced society? This is not a failure of the Internet by any means, it is a failure of society.

As for “What happened?”. The success of the Napster takedown by corporate lawyers squashed much of the hope that was “a network of equipotent peers” (i.e. p2p revolution). Apparently, either we did not understand copyright well enough to argue for free culture (which I’ve re-visited at Ward Cunningham’s original WikiWikiWeb (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FairCredit) or no one else was willing to “fight the power” ON THE GROUND (i.e. #Occupy) to take back a government “of the People” — an issue that is very sad and close to me.

In any event, two lessons to drill into the head:

1) Stop propagating the nonsense that the government is corrupt — because it can only be as good as those who fight for it,
2) Join me and those few of us left who still know the power of the Internet and Believe.

Mark Janssen
pangaia.sf.net