Real Life vs. the Internet @2008-01-26 15:54:34It was about time I made a new posting here anyway...
recent ongoings have made this appear as a sufficiently worthwhile endeavour.
"Project Chanology". A minor quake is going through the internet, and it's not the big truck's
tires having torn this time. Looks like, after all the moderately amusing, but, as a bottom line,
meaningless Habbo raids, Youtube crusades and TV show calls, the English-speaking part of the dark matter
and unexplainable background static of the internet that is "Anonymous" decided to double its dataforce for a
more noble cause at last. The initial spark,
apparently, was the DMCA-induced removal of a
Scientology
propaganda video featuring Tom "Emperor" Cruise off the series of youtubes.
Well... I kind of understand them. Unless you are a totally indoctrinated crackhead, there is just
no way you can equal this to anything other than hilarity-in-a-can with a grain of disturbing. It's
probably a cult's counterpart to leaked Paris Hilton sex videos.
Success so far was moderate-to-decent, with most of Scientology's websites having been going back and forth
between down and slow during the past days and high-ranking Scientology officials being forced to acknowledge
the ongoings in spite of their apparent reluctance to; still, much more than one would have expected after
the amount of controversy in the
spawning thread. Of course, one might question the purposefulness of the measures taken - as Sapient from
RRS put it, "[...] it's easier to tell that Scientology is a fraud/con game if the website is online.".
As the title I picked for this entry implies, however, I think the meaning of this is further reaching than
a psychic capitalist cult being targeted by a bunch of hackers on steroids. The clash that is taking place here
is nothing short of one between the arguably most significant group of "ruthless exploiters" (assuming the broader
sense of "exploit" here) of the "net world" and their counterpart in the "real world"; indeed, in the reports
of certain media outlets on this (*eyes Skynews*), a certain tendency to side with Scientology motivated out of
an implied outrage along the lines of "they are treading on our lawn", grouped with a kind of arrogance reminiscent
of "this is a matter for adults, how dare those kids interfer" - except replace "adults" with "real world
authorities" and "kids" with "geeks" or something. (Speaking of which, I was quite amused to see that word being taken
as an insult for the first time in the course of all the hours I spent on the tubes so far a while back -
somebody polled me to ban somebody from an IRC channel where I had operator status for calling him one)
If the CoS is smart enough here, they could well exploit the chance to team up with all the ??AAs, global player industries
and whatever else there is floating around to form a lobby of unseen before scale for further restrictions to be imposed
on the internet - starting with Fox News and their exploding vans, brick after brick are laid out for depicting
it as a brooding place for hackers on steroids and terrorists who destroy people's lives
and have the cheek to dare challenge real-world structures. Oh well... thanked be the man who came up with public-key
cryptography.
The shortage of any visible retaliation measures รก la CoS does invoke an uncanny "silence before the storm" feeling though...
| |