A remarkable thing happened this week. The internet was threatened by unprecedented government intervention and this threat was met with an online protest of unprecedented size. During all of this, I began reading Josef Pieper's Faith, Hope, Love, not having an inkling the two could have anything to do with one another. But when I ran across this passage in Pieper's discussion of belief, I couldn't help but think of this week's events:
I refer of course to the life of our fellowmen under the conditions of tyranny. As we all know, under such conditions no one dares to trust anyone else. Candid communication dries up; and there arises that special kind of unhealthy worldliness which is not silence so much as muteness. This is what happens to human intercourse under the peculiar pressures of dictatorship. Under conditions of freedom, however, human beings speak uninhibitedly to one another. How illuminating this contrast is! For in the face of it, we suddenly become aware of the degree of human closeness, mutual affirmation, communion, that resides in the simple fact that people listen to each other and are disposed from the start to trust and "believe" each other. We do not wish to rhapsodize about this, and grand words should always be used with caution. Still, we do well to recognize that everyone who speaks to another without falseness, even if what he says is not "confidential", is actually extending a hand and offering communion; and he who listens to him in good faith is accepting the offer and taking that hand. This very advertence of the will, which, admittedly we cannot quite call "love", though it partakes somewhat of love's nature—this sense of mutual trust and free interchange of thoughts produces a unique type of community. In such a community he who is hearing participates in the knowledge of the knower. (40-41)
The internet makes an astonishing amount of communication possible. As Pieper points out, anywhere where there is uninhibited communication, there is a kind of community. Just think about the kind of things social media makes possible. The protests against SOPA are themselves evidence of the power of the internet to connect people around ideas. The threat of SOPA was that it would hinder such open communication. Websites designed for content sharing could be punished because of the behavior of a few of their users. Given the high cost of carefully policing users, many such sites could be forced to shut down. More importantly, new sites driven by content-sharing would be difficult to get off the ground. And to what end? SOPA was aimed, as the end of the video below points out, at making internet users into consumers, so the entertainment industry can make a few bucks.
This video suggests we should be aware of future threats of the same kind. After all, the entertainment industry has long been trying to acquire giant, blunt legal instruments to protects its intellectual property. I don't discourage such awareness, but I would also recommend a different kind of vigilance. One rather disturbing aim of SOPA was to make us into lazy consumers, ready to watch or listen to whatever the entertainment industry puts in front of us. The best way to combat this is to take advantage of the internet's many ways of allowing active communication and community. Go find music you'd never find on the radio (for example, you can get all kinds of free, legal, new music at noisetrade.com). Learn about something you wouldn't pick up at work or in class (learnliberty.org, for example, is a great way to get introduced to classical liberal ideas about economics and politics). Make and make use of things that are only available because of the kinds of things that SOPA threatened. You can become just as passive an internet user as a tv watcher. Don't.
0 comments:
Post a Comment