Our Hijacked Commonwealth

One of our concerns should be how we can save our great Commonwealth that is the Web and its underlying infrastructure, the internet, from its possibly imminent hijacking by the usual suspects.

If we allow internet service providers to be top-down megaliths as was the case with publishing of all kinds before the tape recorder and xerox revolutions we must say "shame on us".

The hacker ethic can still preclude this eventuality, particularly as each of us becomes a server node without the necessity of paying "protection racket" fealty to the entities that have always, until now, managed to subvert our human rights with their "Mafia" tactics, prisons and the captivity of the system of exchange represented by money.

A main hope in this regard is the generation of the young people, mostly gamers, who have been finding ways to say "NO!" to attempts to follow the Pirates of Silicon Valley rather than the more benign populists who gave us GNU, Linux, the Creative Commons; i.e. (in personality symbols) Richard Stallman rather than Bill Gates.

The immediate onset of incredibly powerful hardware will give us an opportunity to pre-empt control of our Digital Destiny.

Love.