Podcast

February 8, 2012

This election year, don’t vote for politics as usual.  Instead, let’s amend the constitution.

Amendment 28: Uncensored internet access is a human right.

The free flow of information in our world is under attack.  Whether it’s SOPA, the EEA, whether it’s Facebook deleting controversial wall posts (see below), Chinese repression of speech, or Chilean abuse of the media, the battle is on.  We as a people need to join together and stand up for the freedom of information.

Today, we live in an un-Democratic society that is ruled by a small number of people, the 1%.  Let’s admit it – corporations run our world.  Corporations are fake people, literally called legal fallacies.  Living, breathing, real homo sapiens should be the ones running the world – not gambling CEO-Presidents who see financial markets, roulette wheels, and war as the same thing.  I traded the stock market better than 99.999% of the world’s hedge fund managers last year.  Trust me when I say this – it’s gambling.  And our leaders gamble with politics.

Hashtags are umbilical cords

Hashtags are how we connect our content to the rest of the web.  Advertisements are taking over YouTube, have you noticed?  Advertisements are taking over the internet.  Advertisements obstruct the free flow of the internet.

Hashtags are the easiest way around this.  Use hastags to find your news, instead.  Don’t troll CNN on TV, troll #CNN, and throw away your TV.  I did.  Get all your information through hashtags.

All of what I talk about in this post is summarized by the hashtag, #twtrevo.  Efficient, no?  Tweet with it!

Perfect Democracy, Today

The internet allows us to have perfect Democracy, a rule by the people.  The internet is the missing piece to the puzzle of government, it is an evolution, not a revolution.  Now that it’s here, we need to write it into our constitutions.

I’m proposing a constitutional amendment – to the US constitution – that guarantees the free flow of information.  Uncensored internet access is a human right, and our constitution must reflect this.

This is just a start.  A guarantee of the free flow of information needs to be in the constitution of all nations on this Earth.  Our freedoms are under attack, and we, the people, are on our heels, playing bad defense (while we’re often distractedly overworking ourselves).  We need to go on offense, by expanding our constitutionally mandated rights to include informational freedom.

We must assert our right to access the uncensored internet.

Mandatory Transparency: Citizens and governments

We’re losing our right to privacy.  Our lives are online now.  Anyone can trade a little cash and find out what you’ve purchased online, or what you’ve typed into Google.

Embrace it!  Live a life worth living and sharing!  I’m starting to accept my own informational nudity, but it’s frustrating that our government remains shrouded in secrecy.

Open the government – start by donating to Wikileaks.  This is complicated, because the government (surprise) has blocked most ways for people to give money to Wikileaks.  But like information, money is free, and can usually find a way around artificial blockade.

Since we, the people, are increasingly forced by technology to be transparent, we need to demand that our governments be equally transparent.

Our government doesn’t need to keep secrets.  It’s a radical idea today, but it’ll be standard in the future.

The people of the world, not the wealthiest 1%, need to be in control of the information that is fed to our political leaders.  I believe that the people who lead our world actually are trying their best to make the world a better place, but they’re working with bad information.

Unfortunately, our leaders are force-fed information by the wealthiest 1%, and for the most part, their world-views have become distorted.  Our world leaders need to have crisp, clear, world-views, and to do this, we need to have a free, uncensored internet.

Hashtags are a way of getting around the information filters of Facebook, Google, or YouTube, because rather than being organized by the algorithmically-ordained relevance standards (which is often up to the highest bidder, anyway), it’s just organized chronologically, with all posts included. Hashtags shouldn’t ever be censored.

Facebook just censored me, like, 10 minutes ago

This really did happen.

Wuterich really did massacre innocent people, and he really did get a pay cut as punishment.

Like a salesman who missed quotas.

Bradley Manning really will go to prison, either for life, or until we free him.  His crime: telling the difficult truths about Iraq.  I posted the immediately above image on my Facebook profile, and Facebook took the liberty of deleting that post for me.

The only word I know for that is censorship.

I found out when I finished writing a comment on the image, I hit enter, and the message appeared “Your post has been deleted, or you do not have permission to comment on it.”  Everything was greyed out with no links, so I hit the back button.  Blank screen.

Since I obviously have permission – it’s my profile, (I legally own it), the post was deleted.  I went to the friend who shared the image with me – gone there too.  Later, the post “magically” re-appeared, and the next day, it was deleted, again. The post is gone from my profile, but I’ve reposted a screenshot.

CNN isn’t going to tell you when censorship happens.  Fox won’t alert you when our voices are silenced.  You’ll see it here, from microbloggers like myself, as it happened to me, 10 minutes ago, on Facebook.  Censorship happens in the United States, and you probably won’t hear about it on cable news.  The sound of censorship is silence, like a person being strangled next door.

Follow me on Twitter @Pythagoreanism, follow the blog here, and support other similar efforts to amend the constitution.  Come November, let’s amend the US constitution – guarantee freedom of information for your grandchildren.

I don’t think the amendment should have any complicated language. 10,000 page proposals for laws are just opportunities for loopholes. No excess complication is necessary. Brevity is the source of all wit, so sayeth the great Shakespeare.

Proposed language of the amendment:

Uncensored internet access is a human right.

Amend it.