Introduction:
The world is not noisy, but cacophonous with human voices, given a megaphone by revolutions in media. The significance of this development is yet not realised by most the public. A phenomenal power has been, throughout history, cloaked by the guardians of ideas wont to turn our volume down. The freedom press, society's greatest engine of revolution, has yet thrived in every era and on every continent uniting the conscious, wilful sensibilities of freedom; we hold it in heart like our ancestors. The freedom press is an offensive against the machine.
These junctures in history, where by invention or ingeniuity people have proclaimed ownership of print and ideas, at first come about silent in the underground, because if power knew about them it could easily, effortlessly, brutally repress them, so free speech pioneers hide as conformists till at least they reach critical mass enough to displace control. Left free to realise its own telos, the discursive demos will transform global society in to a radical information utopia, but the potential is stunted by the skilled struggle of power to suppress it. In all truth, the Internet, that liberator of humanity's best and worst, may have brought us to the climax of this dialectical struggle between the imperative demands of powerful morality and the people's parapet.
For many writers who have considered it the Internet is a glorious panacea, because it decidedly confers control to the public, being too ubiquitous to be isolated and dominated by a single government, and, its architecture seamless as a human heart, it envelops a global zone of communication, containing the DNA of a free state. This is not necessarily wrong in some conditions, but an idealised view because of the perspective of American hegemony. No online communication survives its grasp. The underbelly of public control is the shadow issue of private property. Internet data is easily isolated and stored permanently by deregulated government intelligence agencies. By instituting a vast global architecture of data retention, unconstitutional and deregulated, our lives on the web become the property of Google and, by proxy, government.
Since the inception of the web government has had ever more conflicts with every powerful sabouteur it can identify. They (sabs) know the mind of the new digital fascism better than itself, because they have mined it, and fought it. They know it from a scientific perspective because they are often well versed in the theory and practice of radical encryption. They know it from the vantage point of an insurgency, because they are socially conscientious fighters seeing a better world spin in to view with every hack and every leak. The mind of the new digital fascism is a viral contagion thriving off the decomposing body politic of post-democratic statecraft, which aims to merge society with technological control. The tyranny has trundled past a sleeping congress out in to the day, gathering steam, infecting every society with an Internet infrastructure.
In a bygone, mythicised golden era that stood astride religious tradition and rhetorical revolution, publishers, the makers of ideas and citizens of an international community of scholarship unite by its Latin dialect - dangerously - discussed the future of their world.
The radical among them saw that all that was thought was all that was taught, and because all that was taught was taught by the Catholic Church such a society would continue in steady equilibrium, unless there were an invention to give people power to define ideas themselves, exchange them easily, and persuade instead of coerce.
They realised that the monopoly of religion over print media in the empire created no openings for meaningful control of what is thought.
Remember ideas are a narrative on reality in which power flows. Differences between ideas wrestle for currency, conjuring a surface illusion of a spectrum of choice, but the ultimate form of ideas are ariatocratic archetypes enforced on the public consciousness through overt, covert, latent, patent, implicit or explicit violence.
Mostly we sleep ignorant in an illusion of free will, because a mind unstretched by dimensions beyond the matrix cannot go anywhere else. Like Cubs raised in a zoo we cannot contemplate anything beyond the confines of our domestication.
In the language of ideas what would mediate freedom?
Despite the fatalistic tone I have adopted it makes sense to ask this because language, the code of ideas, is changed, given life by the imagination of individuals. In this conquered, mapped reality, this dark stone castle upon a cliff, could there be cause for freedom? A freedom that could tear down the turrets, rescue prisoners in the basement, bring the people together, and invade the court of the King?
The pure, dreamy quality of incorruptible ideas is dignified by their compulsion to, in the end, break free from chains. Their foundations are hopes and aspirations tying individuals to bespoke dreams of the future, observations and perceptions of the world which is ever spinning in our minds, loves and devotions to which we abide. As the 70's poet and balladeer captured the idea that he did not dream alone, Imagined the communist manifesto - a heresy - in America, so too can the masses dream in solidarity for a realm in which they're free to think.
The old world of rule and rite by rote, far removed from the action of its underbelly, undulating with subversion, was drifting in to a setting sun. Whilst power and its friends perpetrated grave violence to control a nascent new world, acquiring patents, establishing biased methodologies, and inventing intellectual property law, it failed. The church, like a cat too old for the chase, would soon learn it may have been outsmarted by the same mouse that beat the elephant at chess. It could not prevent independence in publishing, despite stealing and breaking the Gutenberg machines. The church - much like terrorists today - ultimately displayed their fall from power in a spectacle of violence designed to intimidate people in to thinking they were still in control. It would go on to enact a gruesome inquisition against scientific beneficiaries of the printing press, who were a selfless collective, persecuting the eccentric to keep the balance of power in service of their staid orthodoxies. Yet the riot of ideas would reflect that awful experience back in to society, to talk louder, more boldly, with less care than before.
We woke up. We saw a cleft path leading to a sublime destiny in freedom heaven dare not forfend, and to total domination. A sublime destiny that with courage and obligation to treating people as ends not means we could rouse to wake. A tapestry of time where the conquerors are finally vanquished and freedom spills.
Time is the trajectory of liberation.
It is harder to suppress an exponentially and erratically booming critical mass of gradually waking minds than to keep them repressed forever.
Revolutionaries believed in, saw they could use, this motion of freedom to create a better society. To take momentum off the elites in their incessant quest for control. To fortify a set of values for a new civic order based on common liberty degraded by duplicitous trials and torture. To create a new future in which those who seek to roll back the cause of humanity follow a path in to the setting sun, the twilight of their power, because to follow that path is to live in true darkness.
It's a myth the exemplars of independence were four solitary American prophets. Scientists, writers, workers, politicians from across the spectrum, the world around, bore aloft the beacon of independence. The anarchy of revolution does not permit for idols. Independence was a forgone conclusion only because the zeitgeist had currency in the hearts of the people. Perhaps independence was not in the divine plan after all, but a footnote to the chaos of history. Yet the trajectory of time fortifies liberty's cause. Its phenomenon has intensified in response to the degradations of modern society and galvanised ever inspiring humanitarian agendas to lift us from that condition.
Independence from authority is the maximum dignification of humanity.
While treacherous tyranny enacts its purges upon isolated, and then millions, of people, a shared valuation of independence means that power, even in its spectacles of control, cannot dictate the way individuals relate to their world.
Staunch defense of independence is a formidable countervailing wind against the dogmas of orthodoxy. No dogma, moral excoriation or threat of violence can kill the thrill of having read a freedom pamphlet.
As globalisation and communications make societies in to a grid which determine thought and behaviour and induce a state of docile passivity and the future is once again tipped in favour of those who own the technics of religion, the web, we must become fluent in its mysteries and use our knowledge to ensure we relate freely when communicating through it.
If we do not, the civilisational telephone will be hijacked by big brother.
Where truth is treason, sabotage is solidarity. We must riot illustrious.