Let me reiterate a point from yesterday’s post “Virtual Resistance” — the network is content neutral. The neutrality ends with the receiving party. Recall my persistent reference to World of Ends. Things have not changed since Doc Searles and David Weinberger wrote that ancient treatise. Pretending that the network can be turned into a passive consumption medium, and that devices can be turned into fancy TVs, is flatly immoral.
It is our moral duty to express ourselves. Whether we struggle with that socially and psychologically is beside the point; the Creator demands that we communicate with others. Barring His choice to limit or remove your ability to react and interact, you are obliged to express your uniqueness. This is inherent in His divine sovereign initiative in making us each different. The mere existence of DNA demands you express yourself. No one else has authority to decide what you should be; it’s between you and God. Just so, your place on the Net obliges you to distinguish between what is and what is not acceptable to you individually on your end, because that in itself becomes the absolute minimum means of expression.
The argument has gone on since the day pitchmen found they could use the Internet: Where are the moral boundaries? Whose presumed rights of free expression shall dominate? We keep seeing this same dispute periodically, and this link to Slashdot is just another example. Look at the comments on that post. If you have time, wade through them.
We know how it works. Advertisers lobby the browser makers to remove user options and force users to endure manipulations, along with every measure (such as tracking and profiling) to allow the manipulation to be more effective. The advertisers want your money, but they seem to enjoy taking advantage of human psychological weaknesses as a game versus simply robbing you at gunpoint. There is some variation in resistance, but certain things are a simple matter of human wiring and we cannot pretend it’s possible to ignore everything that appears before our eyeballs. Fallen human nature alone will make that impossible, but we also have a vast ocean of social and cultural conditioning on top of that. Has it occurred to you that the debate itself is partly psychological manipulation?
And it is so annoying that, just when we think we can rely on one type of browser (anything related to Mozilla, for example) is actually tilting the game in our favor, they suddenly capitulate to the anti-user side and produce a damned sneaky propaganda attempt to justify betraying their user base. And Google? They are far worse, but produce a much better performing browser, too. It doesn’t matter if you choose the likes of Opera, because it’s hampered by the same basic greed for advertising dollars and using the crippled base underlying Google Chrome. Open Source means nothing if the fundamental design prevents options that users prefer. The project is directed by folks who are paid to ignore your requests, so it won’t matter if any of the developers are sympathetic to us.
Right now, the only other game in town is using minority browsers most of you never heard of in the first place. Even that runs into problems with way too many systems administrators outright blocking some browsers from requesting content. I ran into that just this morning, with a site responding to my page request with a “forbidden” code — my browser was forbidden to connect with their servers.
So what happens if we all simply block advertising and all that ad-supported content is lost? Most Internet users have no idea what it was like in the days before it was commercialized. I got in rather early after the commercialization, so I was exposed to a lot of discussion that gave me a feel for earlier times. It was damned expensive to get online until the advertisers got involved. When profits depend on wider access, you can bet any medium gets cheaper. And then there is the always utterly incompetent regulatory measures from government dweebs who remain truculently clueless about how it all works. We cannot go back to that earlier age now. If the war somehow tilts too long in favor of the ordinary user, the greedy psychopaths will purchase more and more painful regulations. The threat of losing content because advertisers pull support from content creators is bogus.
What’s left is frankly unknown territory. We cannot reliably predict how things will go, but change itself is a constant. So I’ll keep using my preferred plain-text or minimal graphics browsers* and let it be. This is the ultimate safe-surfing and adblocking. I’ll do my best to find ways to express my individuality and strive to pay whatever costs are involved. My content will continue because I cannot be silent.
[*] Lynx is plain-text only. So is Elinks but it works differently and is no longer actively developed. Links2 has an option to run with just static images. There are other browsers that compromise between plain-text and full graphical browsers, but they all have their own drawbacks.
