The positive evolution of the human condition requires understanding, specifically, the capacity for understanding. While information is everywhere and ever-occurring without the capacity for understanding it is all meaningless and fundamentally useless and also a rational explanation for why Neanderthals hadn’t developed cell phones?
A critical, perhaps even an absolute necessity, component of the entire process of developmental evolution requires communication, the free exchange of data of every and any type. Every and any form of censorship not only suspends that process, in actually it reverses progress.
In October of 2016 the US Government ended it’s administrative control over the Internet and with it the ability to insure that predatory interests, foreign or appearing as domestic, would be unable to enforce a systemic bias within or about the internet domain. Several groups stood in opposition to the U.S. handover and while there are a great many articles on the matter dating back to the genesis of this contest I believe this BBC piece, from 2016, the most apropos a portion of which, interestingly enough by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tx), to be specific to the point: “In one hearing, Senator Cruz asked if ICANN – the international organization who was given control – was bound by the First Amendment to the US constitution defending freedom of speech. No, came the reply from ICANN’s chief executive, Goran Marby.”
“Censorship is a most dangerous form of enforced ignorance and one to be fought at every turn.”
So you see, again, we have the facilities of common sense that will hold us hostage each time we ignore their precision. I recall writing and speaking on the subject even contributing analysis (on First Amendment and related confiscatory effects on commerce) to committee members and yet it was clear to me at the time that Politicians were already feeding on teats of Big Tech money-handlers which telegraphed their leanings (you can tell by the questions they ask and on the critical risks they deliberately ignore).
I will close this essay with the following excerpt taken from a report I authored in August of 2012:
“One should fully expect that this single move, one so seemingly incidental and innocuous, will have a devastating effect not only on the liberties and freedoms associated with the unfettered and open exchange of ideas (or even commerce) and be a contributory mechanism for a force far more oppressive. Yes, a far greater and truly more significant issue lingers in the ether, a most destructive risk that I’m near certain not a one seems willing to anticipate. I’m speaking of a type of censorship of the most important type of information of all, the kind of information that allows one to detect the open and malicious dissemination of that which is patently and deliberately false.
This marvel we think of as the Internet has removed a most important and effective defense, one which I confess is largely anonymous. I’m speaking of a type of resistance that is embodied in the effort requires to arrange the resources required for mass distribution of messaging, the physical material, effort, financial resources, locale and domestic prohibitions of all sorts financial, legal and social; the simplest barriers that preserve integrity, truth and civility which when are ever present reveal that he who speaks of their own interests is also the voice one hears and the face who must account for that which is both spoken and written.
If you proceed with this effort then you welcome unintended perils as well as those concealed by the cabal of predators supporting an ambition such as that before you. If you proceed with this effort it will not be a time far off when a simple click of a button or the writing of a seemingly harmless code will be protected by our inability to detect that which we are about and surrounded by; a protected form of miss-messaging that will mark our having unknowingly witnessed a strategic ending of reason and the mechanisms necessary, the abilities critical for our understanding and to unfold or reveal that which we are unaware. A very dangerous form of ignorance, indeed.”
Curtis C. Greco, Founder
