Getting to Work
A common thread of respect for human decency.
It’s happened. A part of the internet has been censored within the US. If you use AT&T, you can no longer view img.4chan.org. There was no warning, and it was probably made to seem like an accident. But the censorship of 4chan by AT&T, a company already sued for spying on US citizens cannot be an accident. We’re being tested.
Of course, 4chan is by no means a tame or innocent website. It is, instead, an example of how horrible and awesome the internet can be at the same time. It hosts everything, from nude pictures to pictures of cats. it is a public message board, and people upload anything, and often start online activist movements through it. They tackled Scientology a few months ago, and exposing deaths covered up by the church. It is, most basically, a beacon for free and open speech online. With all the dirtiness that entails.
So AT&T, having been accused of working illegally to spy on people, is now blocking an obvious activist website. What should we do?
Of course, I plan on canceling my business AT&T service immediately. I’ll call everyone I know and encourage them to do the same. But at the root of this, there is something deeper. There are really only 3 or 4 big internet providers within the United States, and most of them have open records of filtering and plans for future filtering of our internet.
How can we boycott a company when our only other choices are the same damn thing?
America is long overdue for a change. And it isn’t something that’s going to come from above, it isn’t some large sweeping change. America does not have any large problems. It never has. It has small, people sized problems. It’s time we stop talk of large issues and started facing our own personal localities. Freedom of speech on the internet is much too important to have 3 or 4 companies in control of all access. We need local providers, and we need more distributed forms of power. We need more locality, and we need a people sized America.
Last week I drove cross country, from Michigan all the way down to Naples, Florida. And despite what all the news reports say about unemployment, Florida is worse off than Michigan. Michigan has a locality. There are people who grow food, there are people who make real things. In Florida, there is nothing. Everyone works in the service industry, which means they wait half a year until the tourists come. There’s a million jobs, but they’re all McJobs. They’re low paying, cookie cutter chain jobs. Not enough to get by on your own, and no room for upward movement.
Worse still, because everything is so new, there is almost no locality, no history. People haven’t lived through big depressions within Florida, nobody knows what it means to look out for your neighbors. So nobody pays attention to where their food comes from. There’s no question, it always comes from “out there”. Somewhere else, where people make real things instead of waiting on each other in restaurants.
If you paid attention during the bailouts, you saw the banks all got together, merged closer, and the big banks became mega banks. They consolidated power, and consolidated power is much easier to abuse. With smaller, more evenly distributed local based economies, we can fix these massive power structures that threaten to hold us ransom. Close your mega bank account and join a local Credit Union. Find a local farmer and patronize them. Eat at your neighbor’s restaurant. Let’s keep each other in jobs that respect human life. It’s much more important than saving $2 on your grocery bill every month.
These things sound so ridiculously small, but they really are the way things were meant to be. If we want to be free, we cannot afford to have such massive power structures. The costs are just too high, and their products are just too cheap.
It’s time to be awesome again. We can do it, we are a beautiful people.
