Geekmocracy

By MAR-VIC CAGURANGAN
Special to the Saipan Tribune

We woke up one day last week and were greeted by news about information blackout. Wikipedia, one of the highest traffic sites on the Internet, shut down for 24 hours in protest of the anti-piracy bills proposed by the Don Quixotes in the U.S. Congress who bear the illusion of control. And overnight, SOPA and PIPA became part of our catalog of acronyms, courtesy of Facebook posts that have been shared away.

In their current forms, both SOPA and PIPA would authorize the U.S. Attorney General to kill a website, block it from domain name servers and delete results on search engines such as Google. Subsequently, this action would unweave the information mesh, the basic principle of the Internet. In other words, SOPA and PIPA are more “1984” than “1984,” hence the opposition from constitutional pundits.

What the SOPA and PIPA proponents seem to overlook is the fact that the Internet is a borderless sphere, where no government can claim jurisdiction. It is an intangible community with renegade netizens and is guided by its own version of democratic rules that cannot be controlled by the mob of U.S. politics.

“Piracy and bootlegging are already illegal. But enforcement is always tricky; rules about appropriate reuse are confusing and not always reasonable; piracy operations are overseas and there is no barrier for U.S. Internet users to foreign sites (at least for now),” Phil Fox Rose writes in the online magazine Busted Halo. (Thank God for free knowledge, I can borrow his mind and I am able to cut and paste this paragraph.)

In an interview with CNN, Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales noted that there is already a system in place to deal with pirates. “Within the U.S. the Digital Millennium Act notice-and-takedown provisions have worked very well. The question of whether foreign sites pose a legitimate problem is I think something that has not been sufficiently studied. It is a valid question,” Wales said.

But when it comes to the issue of First Amendment concerns, Wales said, censoring the Internet will never be the right answer. “We also need to take a look at whether this is the right thing to be worrying about in the first place,” he said. “One of the things that we know is that spending on entertainment is actually up.”

I am biased, of course, being a self-confessed thief. I like free music and I support Pirate Bay. So sue me. Piracy is a philosophical rebellion against the corporate leviathan.

From yet another philosophical standpoint, the enforcement of the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act is doomed to fail, considering that knowledge has been demassified, easily accessible and, yes, easily stealable.

SOPA and PIPA are defeatist attempts to curb the evolution of mass consciousness. I must confess I long for the old world where those who studied Philosophy were distinct from the rest of humanity. But I may be obsolete. My arrogance and conceit no longer have a place in a brave new world controlled by armies of geeks, who comprise the new generation that invented free knowledge. We are beginning to see the dissolution of the individual human mind, which will slowly be integrated into a collage of information authored by all-or by no one. The challenge for us now is how to judiciously use the knowledge capital made available to us by the flea market of free ideas.

Mar-Vic Cagurangan is a Guam-based journalist. She is the former managing editor of Glimpses Publications and is now a full-time domestic goddess. Send feedback to mar_vic_cagurangan@yahoo.com.