Information Wants to be Fr#++ATH&#{1^$ NO CARRIER

The Internet should not be censored and, unfortunately for those who might disagree, any attempt to do so is doomed from the outset to fail miserably. A fundamental tenet upon which the Internet has been built and to which it owes much of its continued success is the free exchange of all forms of information. This ideal holds regardless of your location on the planet, but in the United States it is safeguarded by the First Amendment as a form of protected speech. As with other forms of speech, disagreement is not grounds for censorship. However, this does not absolve Internet users of all responsibility — content illegal in traditional media is also illegal when presented online. Additionally, users are still free to choose what content they do and do not want to consume, but they should not expect some magical device to protected them from such undesirables. Just as there is no magical pair of glasses you can wear to obscure things you don’t want to see, there is no Internet filter capable of removing all unwanted content while leaving the rest untouched. The only safe and sure way to filter the Internet is by using the best content identification and pattern recognition tool mankind has in its toolbox: the human brain.

The Transmogrifier

A defining characteristic of humanity is our skill and penchant for creating and using tools. From a sharpened shard of obsidian to a central processing unit composed of hundreds of millions of transistors, we are continually trying to improve ourselves and our society through technological advancement. In many ways we have arguably been successful, but the process is not without danger. The age of nuclear power brought the hydrogen bomb and space exploration yielded ICBMs — the combined power of which certainly brought humanity closer to the brink of annihilation than ever before. Fortunately not all such marriages produce similarly undesirable offspring. Perhaps the crowning achievement of modern human engineering — a culmination of hundreds or perhaps thousands of preceding innovations — is the child of the personal computer and digital communications: the Internet (that is the Internet, not an internet). It is, according to almost any technological or sociological measure, the most complex, dynamic, interconnected, and immense construct devised and implemented by mankind.

It is therefore expected, perhaps, that a significant portion of the interconnected growth of both the hardware and the wetware (a convenient, if slightly uncouth term for people using the technology) has been organic in nature. Aside from the most fundamental protocols and interconnects of the Internet, the direction and growth of the technology has been driven in an evolutionary fashion: through spurts of success and cullings of failure. Ideas and implementations which are epitomes of pragmatism and logic are rejected while frivolous nonsensicals thrive. It is this aspect of the Internet which makes attempting to divine the future both impossible and immensely profitable.

However, as important and fascinating as such development and technology is, over the last several years the primary focus of attention has shifted away from this aspect of the Internet and been directed instead onto the way the network is actually being used. Humanity has created for itself an immensely powerful tool of unprecedented capability and scope, and even today, some 10 or 15 years after its inception, we are still trying to figure out exactly what it is we have created. At the same time the tool appears to have taken on a life of its own — growing and expanding faster than we can understand such changes. One thing is certain: this tool has already fundamentally influenced human society more than any other and as the number of people using the Internet increases and the number of connections between users skyrockets this influence will only get larger. Once again society has been thrown in the transmogrifier; with some luck what emerges will be an improvement and not a monster.

The Day the Music Died

Copyright law is simple and yet complex, fundamentally necessary and yet fundamentally broken, for the public good and yet a detriment to the public’s intellectual well-being. The basis for the law is simple enough; the Constitution grants Congress the power:

“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

From this single sentence springs the laws of copyrights and patents, and all the intertwined legal baggage we are now forced to associate with them. The Founding Fathers were incredibly skilled literary craftsmen — they did not waste, nor did they use unnecessary words. The inclusion of limited in the Copyright Clause of the U.S. Constitution is very important. Over time “limited” has come to mean less and less, with the current US copyright term being the life of the author plus 70 years. Considering copyright law was designed to “promote progress”, one truly struggles to determine how a term of up to 150 years promotes anything besides individual profit. This is the first way that copyright law is broken: When a limited term is forever extended, is it really limited in the first place? However, this isn’t the only way copyright law has eroded the rights of the public (that pesky group of people which usually fund the works protected by copyright). Fair use law is also under attack, though such attacks are subversive, designed to avoid being labeled as such. Unfortunately, and very intentionally, copyright reform has never been a “hot item” on a political platform. As such, the only way to restore copyright law to its original intent is through education, and depending on an educated public has rarely, if ever in modern society, been a reliable mechanism to enact change.

Equality Giveth and Equality Taketh Away

I believe in equality, without qualification. Equality is; however, a malleable thing, and difficult to define. When applied correctly human equality raises society as a whole. It is a key for the chains around those individuals and groups which are artificially held back. The malleability of equality allows it to be applied easily and liberally, perhaps its most powerful attribute. Unfortunately it is this same malleability which allows “equality” to be dangerously misapplied, misused, and — in a terrible demonstration of irony — act as a lock instead of a key. Title IX of 1972 too often falls into this category. While written and originally executed in good faith, it has since become a magnet for those wishing to impose their own twisted version of equality onto the American education system. Equality does not require that there are an equal number of male and female students enrolled in a school. Equality does not require the abolishment of a male soccer team because there is no interest in forming a female soccer team. Equality does not require an equal number of male and female electrical engineering professors. And, finally, equality does not require an equal number of male and female computer science students. Put simply, honoring equality requires offering equal opportunity within the bounds of equal expectation. For equality — when applied without bound nor mind — is its own antithesis, and results not in freedom, but in tyranny and oppression.

Fallacy of the Amish

It is a natural human tendency to feel that as the size of a community increases, the quantity, quality, and significance of the relationships between members of that community become diluted — essentially, traditionalists fear that a community can outgrow itself. When in such a mindset it is easy to take a step further and conclude that this “communal divergence” is exacerbated by the advancement of technology. Just as the physical growth of a community increases the local population, new technologies such as telephones, satellites, and the Internet transmute “local” into “global”. The key behind disarming this fallacious train of thought is so simple as to be easily missed — while the addition of a globally-reachable community may appear to dilute local communal bonds, the inverse is in fact true. As technology enables people to reach out, it also allows others to reach in. Whether the intentions are that of education, friendship, religion, or just relaxation, this additional human interaction only strengthens the individual, and that which strengthens the individual strengthens the community.