Cyberspace Declaration
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
It is an exciting declaration. Around 21 years ago, when Davos wrote this declaration, he must be happier than we think since, at the first time, tech guys invent a space, which is under no control of any kinds of political, economic power, but fully under control of the technology itself, under the freedom of spirits.
After 21 years, everything goes into another side, in an ironic, dirty and unexpected way.
Massive, out of controlled information floods our daily lives.
Recommend system just push everything you want, makes people impossible to jump out of their knowledge cycle.
Websites, web apps are so easy to make and so difficult to law-define, which just expand every kind of desire, no matter it is evil or good.
Capitalism just find those desires, and holding millions of people’s data, expand desire, and transfer those power into profits
Politicians are no longer terrify the tech, they hire people, transfer the space into their propaganda tools, somehow public somehow secret, somehow into their citizen somehow outside the country.
Information is power, we used to have a clean, freedom information space, and we polluted by ourselves
This space used to be so freedom, and break the boundary of physical limitation.
But nowadays, we are living in our information islands, which is under control of politics, commercial, our desires, and we can’t realize that.
Tech guys are no longer a group of freedom spirits. They are needed, hired by different power in this world, and are willing for it.
Who doesn’t want a high salary and a rich life?
Dream and freedom become rare in the tech world, “foundings, users, stocks and level salaries” are the actual words in silicon valley now.
And that declaration already died, killed by ourselves, silently.
Medium Metaphor
Information is power
How to understand this sentence? We are influenced by the information we received from our daily world, abstract them into rough imagines, and then, we use our imagines to define, comment, and make decisions in our daily world.
That is to say, who can define the metaphor, or who can define the information to cause the imagine in people’s head, he or she can then control the world, by using the metaphor in the social aspects.
And it happened already, several times in the history of human beings.
Our country suffered that pain around the 1970s, under the “culture revolution”, when everything related to “traditional” was being considered as evil, everything related to “knowledge and wealth” was being metaphors as inequality. What happened, is 10 years hazard, until the elder political power went to death, and the newborn political power redefined what is good, then our country went out of the tragedy, and after that, people understand what is the power of “social metaphor”, and treat that thing very careful, in order to make the social to be possible to walk forward.
As a non-native, it might be not so proper to comment the US, but I want to say, the current social in the US is under a very strange metaphor scenario, and I’m not for sure if it is under some unknown power, or it was actually generated by the people themselves.
In the current US, it seems proper to outsource any kind of jobs overseas, even the local people are massively unemployed.
It seems OK to work like kindergarten kids in Huge Tech companies, less than 8 hours work per day and nothing progress codes are generated.
It seems LGBT(might add Q) are no longer just a sign of sexual preference, but seems to become a sign of pioneer of youth and just for “cool”? Even they are actually different people in totally different needs.
It seems under the flag of equality, the feminists will stay in the same line with Sharia supporters, but meanwhile tag people with “do not respect female” casuly just because those people are “tradition and not so cool”?
It seems all the immigrations can only have two states: evil terrorists or pity guys under political pressures. Can’t those people just be normal, only judged by what they are doing, but not judged by their nations, skins, no matter it is positive or negative?
It seems democratic becomes something beyond the law, meanwhile Republican just becomes the sign of uneducated. Can’t we have a normal world, which the people who think Trump is better than Hillary will not be pre-judged as uneducated, meanwhile people who think Hillary better than Trump will not be pre-judged as the regressive left? Can people just talk and share their different views before they tag and isolate different people since they are not so different?
I hope those descriptions are my illusion. If it is not, I hope we can have someday to reduce those metaphor and bring the world to be a little bit normal.
But who knows? Who take responsible for that?
It is not like our country, political change can change everything.
Here is no “big Party”, even something is under the control of the top, the metaphor is under a self-organized situation. Means those things once establish, it will only go to another extreme, and never stop.
Cyberspace is the current medium, but it is something out of control. People will only be influenced by their information islands. And once the circle has been established, people can’t get outside it. Metaphors won’t change, but will only be powered up, until something hazzard happened.
And that is the current age.