They did the right thing
by Chris Gulker
They did the right thing.Despite extreme political pressure, the 9 members of the United States Supreme Court unanimously struck down a provision of the 1966 Communications Decency Act that would have effectively ended free speech in the U.S. In the 21st Century.
"Net Porn Law Shot Down" said one Silicon Valley newspaper. "COURT... SUPPORTS FREE SPEECH ON INTERNET" blared the all-uppercase New York Times headline.
Americans, and, probably, Net users everywhere can breathe more easily.
The U.S. Won't be joining with countries like Myanmar and mainland China to restrict their citizen's speech on the Internet.
Americans will not have to stop and think which medium will carry their current thoughts, and censor them to fit. What we in AMerica can say and print, we can email and publish on the Web.
Halleluia!
In places like San Francisco's Multimedia Gulch and New York's Silicon Alley, there was at least quiet rejoicing.
It was a brief celebration, however.
No one on either side of the issue plans to spend much time resting on their laurels, or lack thereof.
For one thing, people have work to do.
There are Web sites to build, articles, illustrations and photos to create. There are hyperlinks to hack, animations to animate and sound and video to edit and stream onto the Net.
While it's good to know that we can all proceed with the same freedom that our print-only brethren enjoy, deadlines, as ever, approach.
A snarling copy editor is, after all, just as unappeasable on the Internet as elsewhere.
Great freedom brings great responsibility, and freedoms that aren't exercised wither and die.
So get to work, Netizens. Be responsible and start using you newly affirmed freedom.
Put up a Web page, post to news groups, send email to your peers.
Even if you're against free speech on the Net, take advantage of your right to tell the world how you feel.
If you're pro-free-speech or against it; pro-choice or pro-life; socialist or capitalist; communist or libertarian; liberal or conservative; anti-porn or pro-eros; staunchly feminist or unyieldingly traditional; Democrat or Republican; New Labor, Old Labor or Tory; pro-Israel or pro-Arab; Orange or Green; evolutionist or creationist; technologist or Luddite, make your voice heard around planet Earth.
This could be the beginning of a new "age of letters", much broader than the one that arose with the arrival of reasonably reliable postal service in Europe.
People like Thomas Hobbes and Galileo Galilei were among those thinkers who lived in a world where written and printed ideas began to move more readily over hundreds of then-difficult miles than people themselves could.
Western thinking hasn't been the same since.
You, in London or Kuala Lumpur or even Beijing, and I, in Silicon Valley can converse far more easily and (hopefully) frankly than any other widely dispersed people in the history of the planet. The world will truly never be the same again.
And for now at least, many of us are guaranteed the right to publish freely, without censorship.
The planet might just stop being a place where only a few will have the opportunity to advance the species' intellectual treasure.
World-changers can publish directly to their peers. Powerful ideas no longer need pass the muster of University dons or publishing house editors.
Now, we can all play.
It's as if we upgraded our first primitive "thought processor" from a few nodes to a massively parallel human computer with tens of millions of flesh-and-blood CPUs, each taking a piece of a gargantuan problem to solve.
And, have no fear, our lot will be rife with huge problems to solve.
War has yet to be banished as a specter threatening our children.
Hatred, fear, and misunderstanding daily drive us to mindless violence.
Huge numbers of the human family go hungry ever day. Global ecological chaos seems ever more likely.
In short, huge, huge challenges await our global thinking cap.
And, to be sure, idiots will find ways to misuse and abuse this great resource: they always do. Some jerk, somewhere will do the cyber equivalent of shouting "Fire!" in a crowded place.
Worse, sick and tormented souls will pursue hideous crimes using the Net, as they have every other medium. And pundits and politicians will say "I told you so".
But, hopefully, for every miscreant, there will be a hundred or a thousand or a hundred thousand who advance the human debate and the human condition.
And maybe, just maybe, understanding will advance. Perhaps, ignorance and hatred will retreat. Truth and reason, carried not on photons of light but on packets of information, will begin to glow in this planet's darkest recesses.
But it won't happen by itself. Get to work.
Do the right thing.
This page was last built with Frontier on a Macintosh on Mon, Jul 28, 1997 at 10:18:20 PM.
