Why The Internet is Awesome + Why We Should Protect It + My Anti-America Rant- Cheers!

Quite frankly, I am proud to be a part of my generation, because we are a privledged generation.
Generation Y, the children of the Age of Information, where every day the wealth of global information is growing larger and larger, and we have the ability to access it literally at our fingertips.
We grew up on the Internet, or became acquainted at a young age. I compair this to an acedote drawn from Doctor Who, where children of the Time Lord Academy must stare into the Time Vortex.
The Internet is our Time Vortex, and a privledged glimpse into it's totality will probably effect you similarly.
For the first time in all of human history we have an outlet into which the entire globe projects and express itself.
Society is now joined hand in hand with the cybersphere, and the possibilities are endless.
There is so much room for good, so much room for international connectedness, so many more opportunities to bridge gaps in cultural understanding.
This is why the Internet must stay free. Free of surveillance from the NSA, from the GCHQ, from any other would-be or potential national or global surveillance super power.
There are relevent forces at work who wish to restrict our rights in the digital sphere.
Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Oppose, Freedom of Opinion, even Freedom of Association.
They want to control the level and the type of information we are lawfully able to access, and they are gathering our data so that just by using the internet you create a niche for yourself in NSA intercepted data archives.

This is not acceptable.

While many people find the Internet a good way to waste time, or kill boredom, a great deal more are using the Internet to project a message, to take advantage of the Internets unique ability to give people a voice, and to project that voice. People are using the Internet to organize humanitarian efforts, to create social reform, or to demand societal or politcal justice.
The Internet is being used to inform the public of injustices happening around the world, and it is giving voice to a hundred alternative points of view.

As members of a generation privledged enough to exist at the beginning of such a historical event as the Internet, I think it is also up to us to not take it for granted, to educate ourselves on it's governing dynamics, of it's effects on history and society, of it's significance, and to then do what we can to protect it.

Now that I have all of the preachy dialog covered, I want to rant a bit.

I hate, in so many ways, being an American. It goes beyond the fact that as far as accents go we're pretty much screwed in the appeal department, it's that our government has historically gone out of it's way to meddle in foreign affairs, stick it's nose in foriegn policy, get involved in as many wars as it feasibly can, and has been hypocrital since conception; not to mention maintaining a "We're #1" additude all the while.
I hate how our culture dismissed intelligence, instead opting for brawn and material affluence.
I hate our fixation on "the lives of the rich and famous", and how the whole country sits down to watch the most unrealistic television shows in existances, ironically titled "reality TV"
I think Fight Club summed it up perfectly when Tyler Durden said "We are the middle children of history, raised by televisions to believe that someday we'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock gods, but we won't, and we're just learning this fact, so don't fuck with us"
Or when William S Burroughs said in Exterminator! "America is a thin shell around a pulsing core of sullen violators"

That being said I don't have a blanketed hatred for all of America, I just find that there is so much hypocracy, and so much materialism in place of substance in our culture. It is so obvious that it makes me angry not to see change beyond the outcasts chatting amongst themselves.

I have probably dug myself a mighty hole here, so I'm going to call it quits.
I'll probably start publishing articles in the near future on recent events in the world. Anyone interested?

-Harper
September 28th, 2013 at 02:16am