davidallengreen Abuse of police coercive power now far greater risk than any terrorist threat.
Howlin´ Wolf - Howlin´ Wolf (Chess, 1962)
11 minutes ago
Friday, 10 December 2010
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years ago, like 2002 or something, i was part of an online community of poets writing experimental poetry. much of it was, as a necessity of the time, political and critical of the then-current political situation. we were posting everything on a yahoo group. much of the writing was dark, sarcastic, and subversive. someone in the group didn't like certain things that were said/posted, and complained to yahoo. POOF! the entire group and all the archives were quietly and unceremoniously removed from yahoo. no notice, no response to inquiries about what had happened. nothing but a hollow, ringing silence from yahoo. everything was lost to the aether. gone without a trace, much of which had been typed straight into the interface on yahoo, leaving no back-up versions behind. i lost a large amount of political comment/satire/artwork that i had made. hours of effort and thought erased without any warning or recourse. i complained loudly to everyone around me, about how this very event was indicative of new dangers to human culture by corporations with dangerous amounts of control over the communication infrastructure and no clear oversight by any legal authority whatsoever. NO ONE GAVE A SHIT. sure, i should have been more careful about backing everything up. sure, it was a free service, so what right did i have to expect that yahoo "owed" us at least a response to our concerns, if not the obligation to bring their concerns to our group before pulling the plug. now the masses of people on facebook, the control of the email infrastructure by companies like google and microsoft, the serving of web pages by amazon, and the extra-legal maneuvering by the us government through financial mechanisms such as visa, mastercard and paypal is making more and more clear to the world that the underlying support structures for our communication infrastructure is not so much regulated by the passing of and interpretation of legal frameworks based in representative legislation as much as regulated by the brute force of corporate boards and drummed up media hysteria. we keep playing deeper and deeper into the hands of those corporate interests, and unless we make demands for a bare minimum digital bill of rights, we will be at their mercy. i don't know what the way out of this unfortunate situation needs to be, but i've seen too much what these power abuses spell out for our liberty and collective power as global citizens. i've very worried.
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