Date: 29 Jun 2002 20:13:46 -0700
To: 255.255.255.255
From: 127.0.0.1
Subject: The Network Effect In Action


A hoax. A practical joke. A statement. A
call to arms.

Why?

Why not. Somebody had to do it at some
point. I might as well try.

Free speech on the Internet has taken
some pretty severe blows as of late, and
this is a true shame. There used to
exist spaces on the Internet where
anything could be discussed, and if the
content was not to your liking, you
could go elsewhere. The content
generally wasn't archived in any sort of
permanent media, and everything
generally spooled off into /dev/null
after a while.

A sort of death penalty if you will for
the ideas and options presented.

This, in many cases, acted as a safety
valve, for no matter how many times an
inflammatory article was posted, it was
eventually followed up, attributed,
quoted, misquoted, alluded to,
referenced, re-written, spoofed,
parodied and plagiarized. This process
generally left the original message
hashed beyond recognition.

Anyone who has ever played the game of
telephone can attest to this effect.

This meant that offensive or obscene
speech had a pretty short half-life, and
thus the 'public at large' once aroused
to anger about it, found that what it
was originally outraged about had seemed
to disappear into the electronic mist.

Thus, a free exchange of ideas occurred,
and occasionally people got bent of out
shape about things now and then, but
everything eventually blew over because
after some time passed, nobody could
find what they were arguing about in the
first place.

Enter hypermedia archives in the late
1980's.

Back in the old days, hard drives were
very expensive and were the size of
washing machines. This meant that each
bit of data stored was quantifiable. In
some cases, each character cost 1/100th
of a US cent.

To store this article up to the end of
the previous sentence on an old hard
drive would have cost me about $1.48 US.
Now I do not know about you, but the
last time I checked, $1.48 US worth of
current hard drive storage would allow
me enough storage space for hundreds of
millions of characters.

That is quite a few novels.

Or many people's medical text records.

Or even a database of many people's
online writings.

If I spent $250,000 US (which is less
than what many houses in Seattle,
Washington cost now,) I could store so
much information about you, (providing I
could collect it,) I could easily feed
it to a statistical analysis program and
probably have a fairly accurate guess as
to what you like to eat, your age, your
gender or even your politics or
religion.

Why should you care?

Amazing advances in our quality of life
have been enabled via computer models
using 'large' data set manipulations.
The shape of a space probe's thruster or
the hip replacement carved to individual
tolerances enable us to travel to the
stars and help our elderly walk again.

We just need to be careful about how we
apply the data we collect and transform
to meet our needs.

You must already assume that any
government, corporation or private
individual with even modest means now
has the ability to store and
cross-correlate information about all of
us and uses that information to shape
their laws, policies and desires.

Hypermedia archives have transformed how
humans deal with large sets of
information. Performing research used to
be limited to scholars or trained
professionals who know how to utilize
arcane systems of reference across
multiple information sources. How many
of you reading this remember what
subject 523.8 is about in the Dewey
Decimal system?

But I bet you do know how to do a web
search on black holes.

So just what does all this have to do
with free speech?

It means that just about everything that
is published on the Internet is
instantly available to anyone who can
find it. Additionally, since our view of
the information is generally via a web
page nowadays, the telephone effect no
longer comes into  play nearly as much.

This means that all sorts of speech that
previously inflamed people and the
scrolled off into oblivion may now be
quickly and inexpensively displayed for
the world to see without any degradation
of the message via human retelling via
the oral or written tradition.

This is one of the reasons that upstart
companies on the Internet have been so
successful in beating real-world
established firms in the same market. It
is almost impossible to discern service
differences between organizations my
viewing a web page, and the clearer,
more well-produced web site will emerge
the winner every time.

Take a quick peek at Amazon.com's stock
price from 1998 - 1999 for a textbook
example of this in action.

The downside to all of this is that
speech that is now published on the
Internet doesn't go away as quickly. It
can become a target that is easier to
challenge for those opposed to the views
expressed.

From Socrates to Martin Luther to Martin
Luther King, the diffusion rate of
social ideas that are at odds with
society at large have profoundly shaped
the civilizations and the reactions to
those ideas.

The slower the diffusion rate, the more
muted the social response is. The faster
the diffusion rate, the more swift and
strident is the response.

It is as if humanity itself reacts like
white blood cells do towards viruses
when infectious ideas that upset the
status quo are introduced into the
thoughtstream.

We are at a crossroads: for the first
time in recorded history, any person on
the planet who has access to the
Internet can speak directly to close to
7% of the entire world population at
once, and that percentage is
accelerating.

7% sure doesn't sound like may people
until you realize that 7% of the world's
population could constitute the third
largest country on Earth behind China
and India.

The propagated messages may transcend
time, space, truth and even language.

Re-broadcasting ideas via telephone or
television prior to the 1990's required
extensive logistics, organization and
the will to make it happen.

Today, you and I have the power to
create and disseminate our own
television shows, radio programs,
newspapers, magazines, books and music
for the current princely sum of around
$3,000 US Dollars.

All of a sudden, things are looking a
little more equal between the little guy
and the big guy, no?

Governments rightly fear this new state
of affairs, for it is a fundamental
shift in how groups of governed
populations interact.

Governments have now set about creating
standards for content on the Internet,
and defining 'acceptable' and
'unacceptable' contents based on
geographic, social and political
boundaries, unaware that the Internet
itself does not know of those
boundaries.

The general public drift seems to be in
the direction of going along with all of
this, usually under the guise of 'to
protect the children.' Assuming they
even have the opportunity to consider
it.

Look, I'll be the first to stand up and
say that there is a lot of crap on the
Internet that children shouldn't be
looking at, but people are also starting
to seriously say that some information
shouldn't be made available to adults as
well.

Information about fabricating explosives
is usually trotted out as an example of
'dangerous' information. Information
about metal working and automobiles is
also available on the Internet. But I
bet you won't hear a cry to ban sites
about welding when I weld 2 foot long
spikes on the front of my car and drive
it through a mall skewering babies in
strollers.

What would you do if there was a
proposed ban on web sites that contained
information about welding after an event
like the one described above?

What if a terrorist performed the act? How 
would you feel then?

Explosives and welding do have peaceful
uses. How they are applied is what leads
to the thorny ethical issues.

The whole point is that if we become
afraid to speak out and speak up about
some topics, we will quickly find other
related topics that we should not talk
or know about. Eventually, we may end up
just talking about banal subjects
because nothing else is safe to discuss.

Additionally, governments no longer have
the mandate to protect their society's
culture simply because they are unable
to. The very technologies that are used
as the tools of our oppression may also
be used to liberate us from oppression
in its many guises.

So, what is presented within these web
pages here gentle reader, are ideas
designed to provoke social discussion
and thought.

Remember, on the Internet, you really do
not know who is on the other side of the
screen.

Call it patriotism or the obscene
ravings of a lunatic, but never forget
that when we let others decide what we
see, what we read, or what we hear, it
limits our range of thought.

George Orwell's 1984 wasn't so much
about government controlling the people,
but the people letting the government
control them.

Which side do you stand on?