The great Aaron Swartz once said something to the effect that the internet is all at once the very best thing and the very worst thing to ever happen to humanity. As though it presents an artificially realized yin-yang symbol, with both good and evil allotted equal portions, but with any good hiding the potential for evil ramifications and any evil hiding the potential for good ramifications.
As we all know now, for giving voice to such thoughts was Aaron pressured into suicide by the unholy alliance of the FBI and MIT, the same exact unholy alliance which years earlier had cleaned its own records of Bob Lazar having achieved a degree from MIT, in an effort to defame and defuse potent/portent ideas straying from schizophrenic official narratives. All to contain and conceal information and knowledge from the greater masses when ironically, were the greater masses to be better informed and thus better educated, then there would be no need for tech conglomerates to take on roles of gatekeepers by censoring news stories on behalf of the state. A free society is not one where people are forbidden from choosing opinions for themselves. Which brings to mind another Aaron quote, how there is no justice in following unjust laws.
That is what I thought of, upon reading about the Russian government’s plan to soon disconnect, albeit temporarily, from the internet. Even if only an experiment, should they pull off such a step forward in the name of independency, in its own way would it be exactly what copyleft folk are always on about when they talk of the fundamental necessity for a decentralized web. Which we are informed is good. Yet for those who have permitted themselves to become dependent on the world wide web, they will be left once more to their own resources, or rather the resources of their ancestors who somehow got along without such a thing even while many today will equate it with the end of the world. Which we are informed is bad.
There are voices in the west who view such an experiment as a purely dastardly ordeal, but is their concern rooted ultimately in the idea that western voices should keep for themselves such controls over the internet, in Russia and anywhere else, to then be weaponized as warranted against Russia and anywhere else? Might it be jealousy at such control over a literal on/off switch not being in the possession of western voices, no matter how big-headed they take pride in being already? As I have written about ad nauseum, the inability to infringe upon the rights of others is not itself an infringement of any rights. What if their concern is a fear, that shutting these lights down might actually go over quite well for more folks than the minority of the population loudly existing across social media platforms?
Let’s go ahead and theorize what a successful experiment might prove itself to be. Should Russia develop its own internet, entirely cutoff from the rest of the world’s netting, then they would not be able to engage in cyber antics against that netting. You cannot pee in the pool if you stay in the separated jacuzzi. However, it would also mean that, stuck in a box of its own, the more nefarious elements of that netting would in turn no longer be capable of committing cyber antics against Russia’s. So where exactly is the cause for concern then?