“And so the whimper of a black out begins… and ends. What now?”
First off, let me start off by saying it goes without saying that historically and still currently, Operation Reality aka Opreal categorically does not support legislation such as PIPA or SOPA as currently presented before the U.S. legislature nor as described or presented in the various official and unofficial outlets. As a humble, small organization, we are simply trying to do our little bit to help spread the word and seed some thoughts in the hopes that such laws get scrutinized, stopped, or even stomped on in their tracks with rightful reforms and complete negations where necessary. As it stands, such a law would without a shadow of a doubt negatively affect the internet including this very site. Freedom of information, free speech, and sharing are an integral part of our operations as with so many others online the world over. Despite this, we do not deny the need for law and accountability in the online context.
As an international global organization we also do not support similar E.U. or Global treaty frameworks based on or inspired by popular legislation such as ACTA or its derivatives as currently formulated and presented before the current publicly elected bodies that be, who may or may not be willing to overlook the bigger picture and stifle innovation and the competition of tomorrow in order to make a quick buck today.
As we are all well aware, too many detrimental laws have been passed by governments the world over for decades and even centuries now, under the pressure of select minute powerful and dedicated private interest groups without popular consent purely based off of financial clout and contacts. We are firm believers that if we do not learn to resist such patterns of history, history will only repeat itself, with those same intellectually restrictive laws lingering on for decades, centuries, or even millenia. Until eventually, such laws become the very integral norm of the base social and intellectual fabric makeup of the living interacting beings and societies who inadvertently voted and allowed them to be enacted in the first place, whether directly or indirectly, or on the backs of those who were simply being silent; those who blacked out so to speak.
Perhaps though some will argue it’s all a bit late in the game and people didn’t get involved or voice their opinions nearly regularly enough or early enough? The real fact is that these types of grand legal restructurings do not just happen over night nor without reason whether we agree with them or not. Every cause has an effect. As time passes though, even those individuals who were in a privileged position to enact and lobby for them for whatever reasons in turn too will become restricted and subject to them. Potentially even leaving future generations without any straightforward capacity, or clear straightforward course to object, appeal or amend. All this based purely off of abstract subjective political and economic pressure enforced by perennial private interests who do not have the masses interest at heart but rather their own personal and business interests and with the goal of maintaining their privileged positions. Whether we like it or not, such laws must be stopped and conscientiously and actively opposed before they become reality, or we all lose a little bit more free speech, liberty and freedom until we end up tangled down by so many restricting laws dating from god knows when that we are no longer able to express ourselves naturally unfettered as active human beings and participants in humanistic orientated societies and their underlying communication spheres.
As the name may imply however, this is Operation Reality, and we are perhaps at times overly realist about our beliefs and understandings of how the world works; hoping to accurately understand that our conscious make ups of politics, geopolitics and relevant laws are an inherent and integral part of those societal mixes and preconceptions whether for better or worse.
This of course is because it involves the direct implication of real people and their geo-social interactions (which all of us reading this are actors of), and without it, least as we know it, we likely wouldn’t even have any such thing as the “Internet” or “modern civilization” as we currently know or are privy to experience it based off of history. We simply would not be organized or respective of each other if we did not have these abstract legal rules and threats of penalties. Does a nearly extinct lion ask for permission before it slaughters and eats a gazelle in order to survive for only a day longer? No. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying such a societal structure wouldn’t always intrinsically naturally exist somewhere, somehow, but not as the globalized uniform entity as we know it in 2012, and certainly not with the same impact or logic of reasoning behind the stipulation or proposals of such specific amendments of laws seeking to govern even something as incredible as what PIPA/SOPA/ACTA proposes. These are structures we simply would not be debating nor discussing if it was the complete natural law of the jungle out there.
We must never forget however, our current technology and infrastructure is a direct by-product of our organization as structured uniformed societies, which whether we like it or not are intrinsically based on the intellectual concept of law in order to create a certain uniformity and hierarchy. Even if that be in relation to laws that may very well impede and add overt barriers to our natural unfettered biological conscious imagination and natural competitive instincts as the striving surviving species that we all are.
In our existence (at least to all those reading this) the Internet is very well without a shadow of a doubt (intellectually speaking) the current mass driving communication mechanism and facilitator behind this so called New World Order or Globalization for lack of better terminology. We may not agree with its outcome, yet we are all indirect participants whether that be in our success, failure, praise or silence. This structure continues to evolve unfettered despite so many of our instinctively yet usually opportunistically (from a societal/intellectual/economical perspective) inadvertent embraces or oppositions to it in the very same length of breath.
The Internet we are told, is a technology and mechanism that changes all that was past, in reality, it doesn’t really change the real societal fundamentals we know but rather simply makes them more abstract, despite any marketing and PR hype promoted by those individuals and organizations who have something to gain from making you believe otherwise. This is because all real tangible economic and societal activity resulting form the Internet communication’s medium is ultimately based off of humans and societies they themselves interacting, and these are made possible by governing laws as we know them. Why should the Internet be any different? Do we seek some sort of escapism into the virtual? Some sort of abstract lawless society without respect for the same laws we are subject to in the offline world, instead being governed by purely technological laws and limitations? Perhaps, but I think we all know escapism from the regular mundane segmentation of laws of societal nation states and their inherent barriers in favor of some sort of global free for all technological utopia is not what any of us are truly looking for either.
Without the human and inherited intellectual societal structures and interactions present, the Internet is simply a bunch of machines or unaccountable bio-mechanical individuals communicating based off of instinctive and opportunistic rules, trends and guidelines, opportunism at its worse. Despite how much we may yearn and seek as so called conscious individuals to view ourselves as being unique and somehow outside of the so called law abiding flock of sheep, in reality we naturally all live amongst it and follow it, online or offline, we are all a part of it, the same collective, the privileged and underprivileged alike. We simply choose to ignore it at times.
This my fellow Internauts, is why we should be routinely voicing and lobbying our opinions and stances without fear, in particular in the area of politics and law, being more vocal, more persistent, engaging and more direct with our representatives. Staking and scrutinizing our legal ground year round, 24/7 365 days per year and acting on it in order to get our point across loud and clear and affect positive change. We should not find ourselves in the situation we find ourselves now, waiting, for some sort of one 12 hour or 24 hour last minute gimmick protest period to make our voices heard and get the message out while in the meantime every other day of the year we are acting like uninterested and clueless cattle moving where ever hearded.
Instead of the flock spending its time polluting the online ecosystem with Internet memes and cat videos, it needs to be stating and expressing social and political positions, lobbying and even more importantly creating, acting, voting, running for office, making it clear that you will not simply sit by idly being spoon fed your favorite “free” content produced and owned by some third party and only waking up when it’s threatened to be taken away from you or charged for. Ultimately we must assert that we have the true societal and gross external influence year round on all laws and not just those which threaten our own personal little bubble.
Until such a mentality shift takes off of course, we may very well believe we have no other means but to simply engage in periodic virtual hunger strikes, proceeding to voluntarily silence and black ourselves out in order to feel like we’re doing the bare minimum at making a difference. The fact is we are not being proactive by blacking ourselves out, we are being reactive, and worse of all only temporarily, and those who do so are essentially silencing themselves voluntary. It should be the other way around. By silencing yourself you will almost always lose.
Do you see our beloved Google’s, Facebook’s, Twitter’s and those who claim to actually allow you to get your individual messages across and voices heard amongst the flock blacking themselves out? NO you don’t, as they have already understood the reality of certain things, they no longer view themselves as the sheep but as the shepherds and are acting as such year round overtly and covertly.
Don’t suckle the tit of your pay master year round and only decide to abstract and purposely silence yourself out of the equation for a few hours to rebel one day per year only then to start suckling on it again a few hours later. You cannot simply talk the talk year round, then walk the walk only one day of the year and expect to be heard or taken seriously by those in power. Yes, Wikipedia (main exception), Reddit and all those other random Internet meme websites we’ve never heard of until now but are suddenly jumping on the SOPA bandwagon for publicity, are you really going to keep latching on and suckling at the tit that feeds you solely to get your name out there or are you serious about creating and initiating change year round beyond 3 minute PR gimmicks?
Instead of blacking out in protest, try communicating more effectively and more regularly, get involved in politics and not only on issues that affect your personal business interests only when it suits you to do so. Otherwise it simply reeks of yet more unfettered marketing opportunism which plagues society enough as is, both online and offline.
A little simplistic background info on PIPA/SOPA for those who somehow may not be aware of what it is by now.