I admit, I panicked a little tiny bit when Wikipedia voluntarily went dark this week to protest… something.
Like most noble gestures, it seemed entirely self-defeating. How am I supposed to know if I’m against it if I can’t check Wikipedia to find out what it is?
It wasn’t until it was missing that I realized just how much of my brain functions I’ve outsourced to the internet. Do I actually know anything about cultivars of common orchids or do I just know where to find it in a hurry? The line has become fuzzier than I’m comfortable with.
I have maintained some perspective, though. I understand the information available on Wikipedia is suspect. All I need to know about Wikipedia is that the articles displayed there are editable by anyone, up to and including me. This is not false modesty: outside of a narrow band of very specific knowledge (toilet repair, vegan baking, Scandinavian clown porn), I should not, under any circumstances, be taken as a subject-matter expert on anything. Just the possibility of someone like me potentially inputting information should undermine the legitimacy of the data in any repository available to humans.
But Wikipedia isn’t about “truth†in the classic, academic sense. It’s about volume and speed. Its value is in relationship between the sheer mass of information posted and the expediency with which it can be accessed. Maybe I can’t make an informed judgment on the validity of the article in front of me about, say, geothermal power in Iceland, but I sure didn’t have to wait a long time to get it. The point of it is that I don’t have to know more than the author; as long as you don’t know more about it either, it’s perfectly safe to bore you with at a party.
When you get right down to it, isn’t that the base-level metric for the worth of any knowledge? How quickly it can be processed into small talk. Yes, it’s superficial knowledge, but what’s deep about talking about the weather or traffic or (if there are more than two guys in the group) driving routes to avoid traffic or (if only guys in the group) the best places to find pictures of naked famous people? Except for that last one, none of those topics are of any use or interest to anyone either. If I can mix in an interesting (but entirely unvetted) fact about how to salt-cure shark meat, who loses?
OK, usually me as I’m left muttering to an expanding and dissipating circle of people with better-honed social skills and functioning senses of self-preservation. But hey, less people I have to share my shark meat with. That’s a tie at worst.
Here's the scary part. All of the People's Republic of China, less the Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macau are behind, for internet purposes, an information filter generally referred to a The Great Firewall of China, a play on words. There are thousands of banned sites, including YouTube, Google and Facebook. There are ways around it, called Virtual Private Networks, but for the most part, the netizens of the PRC use locally developed substitutes like Baidu. The US government has been 'studying' the Great Firewall for years and now the PRC is exporting the technology to other countries, so that they can isolate their citizens from the open internet. Hmmm, let's see, keep them even more uninformed and, hmmm, made in China.... could happen here!!
The force behind SOPA is the entertainment industry, because digital downloads and digital content are supposedly costing them millions. They've made HUGE political contributions to BOTH sides. They'll get what they want, eventually, because Congress is like cheap cake mix, just add water and eggs. In the case of Congress, just add lobbyists and money and they'll bake you up a law.
A guy in Shanghai told me that the going price for a bill in Congress is about 50 million US dollars, spread around between lobbyists and PAC's. Perfectly legal, too, now that Chinese shell corporations can purchase near defunct USA companies and use them, legally, to channel funds, as a Supreme Court decision has ruled corporations to be people for free speech, including the free speech of political contributions. So far, President Obama says he will veto SOPA, but Hollywood and The People Who Run Media Stuff are his largest contributors and there's that election thing coming up. So the veto of SOPA could get like closing Gitmo. Or not.
Of course, we still have ESPN, so who cares? Hey, the Lakers are playing [IDK, whatever] this weekend, so the males of America can go back to sleep. It's all good. 不用擔心, 美國. 您的生活美麗!
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