I've been lurking on line for a couple of decades now, but I only feel safe posting in a few places due to one very simple, but profound fact. The internet functions just like a small, relatively isolated town/community. All the things I love and hate about coming from a small, rural community are everywhere on the internet and in internet culture. I am aware of the pitfalls, too. Aaron Swartz ran afoul of small-town-isms on the internet, and it proved fatal for him. Which is why the internet scares the beejesus out of me at times. Posses and lynch mobs still exist. Their horses are metaphoric and their ropes may be virtual, but they are no less deadly.

As great grandchild of sod busters and a great great grandchild of the American Civil War and indentured servitude, I was raised on the stories of what my ancestors did to each other and had done to them while pursuing their dreams. I am also aware of how their dreams have influenced mine. All of the life lessons contained in those oral histories are mapping pretty much one-on-one to current internet culture.

We are, all of us, pioneers. While space may be the final frontier, this, the internet, is our current one.

This is part of what Bruce is pointing to in the essay (or at least the bits quoted here). Distributed power is beginning to concentrate, and this is likely to continue.

An interesting call to action, Patrick, but what actions do you recommend? And how will we know if the actions are working?

What? Swartz ran afoul of a zealous federal prosecutor. I don’t see how that fits into any kind of “small town” narrative.

(EDIT: Computers, Freedom, and Privacy)

bruces put on minimal disguises -- mirrorshades, a spook's dark glasses, a banana-republic general's peaked cap -- and in character talked about how useful the net was for violent and power-hungry bastards.

It seems utterly dead-on now, particularly how autocratic regimes use the tools of the net to crack down on dissent.

* * *
Me, I give the EFF $100 a year and let their pros do the work. I used to be try to keep up with the issues, but man, it isn't easy.

As M.Scheiner says, vigilance - constant and unremitting - is the only way to protect our first amendment rights. (And, even that might not work.)

Americans have clearly demonstrated their willingness to abandon their liberties to secure their "safety". Patriot Act anyone?

Franklin's warning has lost nothing over the last two centuries:

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

It was clear to me very early on that "The Internet empowers everyone." I applaud the wider recognition of this reality and can only hope it has come in time. One factor that perhaps weighs in our favor: I do not think that the freedom of the internet and the decency of its early administration was entirely "a fortuitous accident;" there was a lot of good will that made it possible, and much of that good will is still there, still waiting to be tapped.

Rikibeth, #4: "So, how does a non-techie fight for this, outside of signing petitions and writing to Congresscritters?" Be a good netizen. It matters, it matters a great deal. How we conduct ourselves at what is still the dawn of the wired age will make a difference in the future.

If I own a tool, and someone else owns a more powerful version of that tool (or can command many more tools than I) I am not as powerful as that other, nor am I their equal. No matter how much I delude myself into thinking so.

Out of curiosity, whom are you addressing here?

As far as I am aware, Patrick's record as a hardcore libertarian is only slightly less well-established than his record as a prize-winning showjumper. And it's not like this is a libertarianism-default community.

(Or is this another case of Movable Type eating <sarcasm> tags again? I hate it when that happens.)

"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the Rich and Powerful to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

hmm, well the american public has given up some essential liberties to obtain a little temporary safety (or the illusion thereof) over the past decade or so, thus by this dicta it is reasonable to deprive said public of both liberty and safety. How nice for those who might wish to do so.

That was my roundabout way of arguing that probably everyone deserves both liberty and safety as a matter of morality - even if it might stick in our craw at times.

Heck, I did that, back when. But that was 30 years ago.

If you have not read Animal Farm, it might be a good idea to do so soon. Orwell aimed it at the Stalinist Soviet Union, but the value of the parable is not diminished just because the target now rests in the dustbin of history.

Also, the link to women in early radio reminds me: radio* was seen (and often was) a tool for freedom**; it was also quickly manipulated as a tool of capitalism and authoritarianism. Radio is not the internet, but the historic similarities and differences are worth consideration in the context of freedom and constraint.

*Your cell phone, smart or otherwise, is also a radio. People are often surprised when I mention that, although I suspect fewer in the
Fluorosphere are.

**Tweets from Port Said and Tahrir Square have a pedigreee that goes back through Radio B92 of Belgrade, through Budapest in 1956 and the occupied countries of World War II and the Spanish Civil War and every twentieth-century freedom movement that could put together a boradcasting set.

Vincent: Bacon tastes gooood. Pork chops taste gooood.

There's going to be a lot of work to be done just to stop the CREATe forum turning into a rubber stamp for the snout-in-trough middlemen and their obsession with beating up on PIRATES!!!1!!ELEVENTY!!! (their preferred policy). And the scary bit is that this mostly academic research program will feed into evidence-based policy making by the UK government (insofar as it isn't nobbled by lobbyists representing the main moneyed interests) and quite possibly end up influencing IP policy at an EU level, and then at a WTO level.

As another delegate remarked, it was interesting how many people were focussing on the word "industry" any how few were focussing on the word "creative". Indeed, the same miasma of greed dressed up in sanctimonious market orthodoxy was rising from many of the participants in the enterprise that Patrick remarked on in this blog entry.

((PS: I'm using a pseudonym to make it marginally less likely that this will come up in the results for searches for CREATe and insert-my-name, because I don't want to be quite this scathing in public without marginal plausible deniability.))

I think one of the unsexy forces that really drives the world is the kind of research that gets funded, and how it gets funded. Without vast funding from two countries bent on having the power to wipe each other off the map, we wouldn't have fusion bombs. The cold war led to funding research and development of all kinds of technology that pushed the world in a certain direction. Even as the technology spilled out into the public world, the things that got developed in well-funded labs vs garages were determined by what seemed useful during the cold war. For the last decade and more, anything with a homeland security angle has had an easier time getting funded. And DRM-related stuff has been able to get funding and interest largely because of the rich, politically-connected industry that needs it. At the same time, the dot com bubble, high-risk drug development by biotech startups, kickstarter, and the open-source movement are all ways that totally different stuff got developed. Existing big companies and industries tend to fund research that's a natural extension of what they're doing, but then sit on a lot of it because it conflicts with their current business. (Famously, IBM and Xerox and AT&T paid for the development of a huge number of wonderful ideas and technology that sat around unused till someone else ran with it.).

I am not sure how predictable the effects of these funding mechanisms are--you can fund Cold War stuff and get the internet, or fund cancer research and learn about retroviruses. But it has a huge impact on the world. Different funding decisions and mechanisms 40 years ago would make the world a radically different place.

"…where are geeks allowed to be vulnerable today?"

My comment, "There was space to move, not the white-hot attention of a thousand amateur paparazzi, and black-cold attention of a whole world of police and prosecutors."

Well, for one, keeping an eagle eye on relevant legislation, for sure.

For another, I'd really like to see peer-to-peer routing become a practical reality.

(Meanwhile, I'm going to be giggling over abi @12's image of Patrick as a prize-winning showjumper for the rest of the day....)