Okay Geek Farm
Editorial - Prince Predicts The Net's Death: And I Agree...
Darryl Cobb
Ding-dong the Net is dead, as announced by Prince, but I’m going to take a little different take on this. I’m going to take the position of why Prince may be on to something here. I’m going to go out on a limb and say, “Prince is 100% correct. Don’t worry Prince, here’s one geek that has your back.”
There are many things that are to blame for the complete demise of our newly favored method of communication; lack of innovation, accessibility, censorship, piracy, and the enabling of lethargic thinking, but let’s put names and faces with those who murdered our beloved Caesar.
I dare accuse state sponsored censorship. The greatest right in the United States is the First Amendment which guarantees us free speech. The purpose of free speech is to have all ideas contested in a spirit of rigorous debate. It is our duty to have our truths scrutinized, our deepest held beliefs challenged, and our prejudices exposed so we as a society can move forward. Imagine if that was turned off by the flick of a switch? Imagine if we couldn’t express our outrage at the questionable Election of 2000 or 2004. What about the anger at how our government treated the victims of Hurricane Katrina? Well, no one has to look further than Iran’s censorship as an example during their last election of Ahmadinejad. Also, there is China’s struggle with Google, or Pakistan’s blocking of Facebook over satirical cartoons. And now, our own government wants an internet kill switch.
I dare accuse piracy as well. Piracy is killing the talent and genius that allows the internet to be what it is to us today. We are patrons of a genius like Prince, a prolific artist like Frank Miller, or dare I say the visionary of Spike Lee. There is the provocative nature of Michael Moore, the soul rhythms of The Roots, or the escapism of Fallout 3. Increased piracy will make genius like this unable to live off of their talent, and give us what we truly need in our world of black and white, legalese color. Without these great minds like Michio Kaku or Dr. Stephen Hawkin to exchange their ideas and have their work financially benefit furthering of that work, what would we share? It’s hard to visualize Avatar 2 or The Unified Theory of Everything from the comfort of your local fast food establishment, let alone mathematically define it. And then there is the other hand of it. We have our governments imposing invasive laws like the DMCA and negotiating the coming ACTA Treaty in secret (don’t worry, a forthcoming article on that is to come).
I accuse lethargic thinking in the death of the internet. Instead of using the net to inspire new ideas, bridge gaps of language, and culture and giving birth to a greater society, we failed with our own laziness. We use the net to, not challenge our ideas, but to confirm things we already know. We even go as far as to filter information by what we believe instead of what is true and concrete. We even go out and manipulate facts and figures on websites to fit our own ignorance and hatred. We use it to issue religions verdicts or fatawas threatening satiric artists, demonize entire religions, and give voice to those who will only find courage behind an anonymous username. We’ve become a collection of followers to a digital messiah that now tells us how to think, how we should think, and when we should think. But we were too lazy to ask, who’s asking us to think this way and why?
The last thing that has killed the internet was our lack of innovation. When we stop realizing that we had the tool of Michio Kaku’s Type 1 civilization at our finger tips and the only thing we can think to use it for is passive entertainment and social networking. We failed to realize the internet was to unite this world in all its differences, yet we’ve decided to let if further divide us due to our arrogance. Instead of attending MIT’s open university we flock to Mediatakeout. We stopped innovating how we teach, how we bring family together, and how we choose our leaders - but our internet jokes and memes are getting better and better though!
We are the generation of the internet, and I firmly believe it will live or die with how we treat it. I’m quite sure this isn’t what Prince was alluding to, but I thought it brought a perfect time to discuss what could really kill the internet. So we have to choose, live or die?
