There's been a lot of hype on the internet regarding some bills in Congress, called the Stop Online Piracy Act (in the House) and the Protect IP Act (in the Senate). I am, once again, certain that my readership is not enough to lend support to the cause of bringing these infamous bills down. Despite this, I feel that by merely mentioning them once more here, I am empowering the entity that seeks to defeat these bills. Google is what comes to mind first here.
Imagine it, the biggest internet-based company in the world, suffers drastic loses due to thousands of sites and links being blocked for copyright infringement. That affects pretty much everyone, including the elderly of Congress. All of a sudden they don't have their research prepared because whoever does it for them cannot access it readily. The more I think about it, the more this goes beyond entertainment. The education system has only JUST integrated the internet into its systems. Since I started high school, the use of the internet by teachers and professors has increased tenfolds. Youtube videos are now regular teaching aids, and quick facts get brought up by wikipedia and Google. Hell, my college uses Google for its entire e-mail system. Group projects would get so much worse than they already are...of course, the assignments themselves would probably be drastically different since information can't be exchanged as quickly and easily as it could before.
Contrary to the total number of hours per week I spend on the internet, I am typically for the reduction of internet in our daily lives, or at least mine. I support people not instant messaging and instead calling on the phone or meeting up. I support CDs instead of MP3s (even the legal ones). I support not knowing more than I have to about people I don't love dearly. I know I spend too much time in cyberspace and my communication skills have suffered for it. Most of the world's has. I'd have a lot more free time on my hands if it weren't for people posting twenty seconds clips of Dragon Ball Z on Youtube. At the same time, however, there are things I've gotten from the internet that I would never dream of giving up.
Last year the fan website Green Day Authority had for download a bootlegged song that the band had played at a soundcheck while on tour. In order to get it, I had to join their forum, the Green Day Community. So I did. For something like 8 months, I was never heard from again. Just this past February though, I became active on the site, and now, in November of that same year, I can say that I've met some truly amazing people that I had a 0% chance of meeting otherwise. Some of the friends I've made are closer to me than people who live a few streets over, and they're generally a good few hundred miles away or more (and NAUTICAL miles in some cases). I will firmly attest that these friendships are as real as any friendships that occured between neighbors in the 1960s. I love some of those people, truly I do.
They made me think of a friend I'd met over the internet before this year. Well, my first was a girl named Katie who lived in Missouri, but that's not all that special. In 2008, a friend from school somehow got me cybernetically introduced to a girl from Canada. I still have texts on my phone from that girl when the two of them, one in America and one in Canda, were screwing around. In 2009, that friend from school committed suicide. I'll never forget the real emotions that I felt from Canada on that day. I was so moved that when I could, I never failed to speak up on behalf of the people that my friend touched from hundreds of miles away, because for all their pain they deserved no less.
I'm fairly certain that were I to leave the world in short order, you would hear voices from places that aren't just America. I'm certain now that I have touched those internet people like they've touched me, for I would certainly cry out for them if they were to leave me alone. It's truly amazing, when the source of these potentially powerful emotions is a little bootlegged song from a fan website.
In the past year, I've tried to make myself a presence on the internet. One of the most recent and primary attempts at this occured when over the summer I discovered a Youtube user called NintendoCapriSun. This user both delighted and scared the daylights out of me. At 35 years old, he was posting videos on youtube of himself playing video games and talking over top of it. He wasn't married, had a shitty low-end job, and was not, I admit, too easy on the eyes. It scared me because I felt like I was on track to become this man. As I watched his videos however, and laughed with them and at them I realized something. I realized that being NintendoCapriSun when I was 35 wouldn't be so bad. i discovered that at 19, I was still learning not to judge books by their covers.
He's not a special man. He'd faced struggles like everyone else. He had to quit smoking at least twice, and both times he did it on Youtube. You listen or watch his vlogs and you know he really is all that he seems. He's is a 35 year old video game nerd without everything the world has to offer, but at the same time he's on top of the world. He harbors hate for no living thing, and despite everything has kept doing the things he loves, and has never faltered in updating his youtube pages consistently. YouTube is a tough world too, and yet he's brave enough to show his face on it without being Brad Pitt. NintendoCapriSun is not a celebrity, but he is to me, and a damn respectable one at that. After watching him I decided to give his type of video a shot, and lo and behold I now have quite a few videos worth of Lets Plays on my youtube channel. NintendoCapriSun inspired me to actually do something...and he's just a man on the internet playing video games way past the age when he supposedly should have quit.
Then there's this blog, and by extension, my posts on Green Day Community. I used to have a notebook where I wrote about the day's events and stuff. I haven't written in it consistently for months. Why? It's all here, on the internet now. It's in the chat windows of the aforementioned friends, in the commentary of my Let's Play videos, and in the entries of this blog. Instead of keeping all of that bottled up emotion and thought for myself, I've let it go into this infinite space. I've found a way to express it all in a better way, and I feel better for it. On the internet nowadays I'm more sociable than I've been in a long time. I post comments everywhere and have things to say. I have hope that someday my thoughts will mean something to people in the same way that NintendoCapriSun's do. The only way that'll ever happen though, is if I put them out there. Thus began my mostly benign scheme to make myself into a huge presence on the internet that people can engross themselves in and possibly relate to. Sometimes my words are not my own. Sometimes I'll express what I'm thinking with a Youtube of a song or scene. It's all still me though. Years of surfing the internet have made me into a nerd culture wiz machine, and I reference things so much that it's ingrained into my everyday speech.
I will freely admit that SOPA and PIPA are some of the scariest things I have encountered in some time, and that's including the economy and the shoddy job market and all that. I'm afraid to have my friends taken away from me. I'm afraid to lose a shot at my dreams. I'm afraid that inspiration will be that much hard to come by. I'm afraid of losing hours of entertainment. I'm afraid of having my numerous forms of self expression slashed. I'm afraid of having a place to talk to people with interests similar to my own foreclosed. I'm afraid of being denied an understanding of the world we live in, good or bad. I'm afraid of losing touch with the people in my life faster than I could ever dream. I'm afraid my life being forever changed by the absence of something that changed my life forever.
What Congress has in its hand is a time machine. Unlike the literary time machines we are used to, Congress' time machine works on all of us. The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act will send us all almost ten years into the past, back to a time when those obscure songs and shows you loved as a kid and desired to relive were just memories, and back to a time when communities existed only within the boundaries of a full tank of gas. The internet is a great and powerful beast, untameable by any one entity yes, this is true. It is a chaotic neutral that does its share of both good and bad. By creating it, we humans have created our very own world inhabited not by us ourselves, but by our ideas, visions, and imaginations. I understand that this world gets abused, much as we abuse the Earth, but introducing something like the SOP Act would destroy the beauty of human conciousness that has come to exist within the internet.
As the platform of human advancement, the internet is one of man's greatest creations, and has been at the forefront of technological advancement for some time, and thus much effort has been put into making it a better place. Much of that effort has come from normal guys...like Andres Martinez (owner of GDA) and Timothy Bishop (NintendoCapriSun) who have made something of their passion, and watched is it evolved into a den of human activity and communication. Without people like this, the internet would because sterile and soulless. The work of millions of people would be in vain and all that they have created would be in danger of destruction at the whim of a government agency or corporation.
It all seems so surreal to me, that such a bill could exist. How could something...anything be THAT powerful? How could ANYTHING be so threatening to the internet on which I thrive? Beyond that, how could ANYONE think that something like this is a GOOD idea? That is what truly appalls me. Those who seek to pass this bill seem, to people like you and me, to have no idea what they're getting themselves into. Their Google would never be the same, and our everything else would be threatened. I often wonder if my view on this matter is exaggerated and overdramatized...but if I don't remember the brighter side to what's at stake here...I can't help but feel scared by any degree of threat.
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