“Nature knows no indecencies: man invents them.”
~Mark Twain

How would you explain the Internet to people living 100 years ago? Admittedly, 100 years isn’t a very long time but it’s more than sufficient to purify our reference points. For instance, it would be meaningless to define the Internet in terms of “computers” let alone “computer networks”. Blank stares all round.

“In 2011 we have the technology for all humans to communicate their ideas with one another, freely and instantaneously, no matter where they are on the planet, and regardless of who they are. Anybody can potentially talk to anybody… and everybody. The whole planet can pool resources, do business with each other, share photos…”

The list goes on. Humans are social creatures and, if social interaction is a metric of our evolution, then we are now surely evolving at an incredible rate, exponentially faster than ever before. Whereas once geography constrained our contact with, and consciousness of, other human beings, we now have the ability to share our thoughts with anyone else on the planet who cares to listen. Any cynics among you may well retort that the idiot is simply no longer confined to his village. But there are billions of other people who are busy comparing notes, growing in empathy, and trying to work out what on earth is going on in this crazy world of ours.

This collective effort is the essential magic of the Internet—a free, decentralized and unregulated information exchange. Doesn’t that sound intrinsically like a good thing for humanity? Or does such a system necessitate a controller? An authority. And if so, who?

Hilary Clinton declared Wikileaks "an attack on the international community."

Living without a radio, television or newspapers, Hillary Clinton’s words about the website, WikiLeaks, may have passed me by—if it were not for the Internet. She called the whistle blowing website “an attack on the international community”. If it were not for my ability to go online and compare her words to the headlines after 9/11: “America Under Attack!” I may have found it considerably more difficult to establish an historical precedent for politicians using words like “attack” exclusively on occasions when a response is on the cards. When mass mind manipulation technology (i.e. television) was used to convince Americans that they were “under attack” what happened next? They were quickly given the Patriot Act and a perpetual (and highly profitable) global war on terror.

So what can we expect when the “international community” is declared to be “under attack” because a website has revealed a few relatively harmless diplomatic cables? The answer is, of course, mandated control of the Internet. And if we are fooled into consenting to this, we may well have to rephrase our aforementioned definition:

“In 2011 access to information is based on privilege and position. All the data you access is carefully monitored and recorded to ensure that your usage is compliant with the Cyber Terrorism Act.“

Whilst we still have an Internet worth protecting, perhaps we should take a moment to research the age-old tactic that governments employ to retain and consolidate their power over the people. Lest, before we know it, the results yielded by Googling “problem reaction solution” may only yield a conspicuously restricted set of results.

WORDS: Boris Bell