This is just a prophetic warning to folks who assuredly aren’t listening to God in the first place.
First, a basic principle: The virtual world is not the same as the real world. What works in the latter doesn’t necessarily transfer to the former. This isn’t just a matter of practicality; God is backing this up. If you try to force your meat-space ways into virtual space, it won’t just fail, it will incur God’s wrath. The virtual world isn’t special or holy in any sense, but it most certainly is different.
This has nothing to do with my underlying dislike for how the so-far necessary hardware to access the virtual world is harmful to our human welfare. I use the Internet and spend an awful lot of time messing with networking and computers, but I will be the first to tell you this thing will bring a whole new kind of suffering and sorrow. That’s just part of our fallen existence; I have to use what God provides. That’s another issue entirely. My point is that it is different and you should not imagine that God and His Biblical Law has nothing to say about it. The principles are different simply because of what is and is not possible.
What isn’t possible is dragging all the legacy functions and systems of government into the Networked Age. I’ve been keeping track of legislation and technology, and I assure you that whatever passes for regulation and law enforcement in meat space is not going to work on the Net. It hasn’t worked so far, but you’ll notice that has not deterred the evil of broken humans truculently trying to force it.
Blunt warning: The virtual world will destroy the current government of the United States (and eventually most other currently existing governments). Funny how the US government created the Internet and it’s going to come back and devour the system that gave it birth. The Internet has a life of its own; it now exists independently of any meat-space efforts to control it. Further, those who actually run the Internet in terms of breathing life into it (technology developers) will become increasingly dismissive of attempts to hijack and reign in this thing they love and in effect worship.
So when US law enforcement agencies insist on dragging their (largely incompetent) meat space tactics and strategies into the networked world, they are fighting God. What this will require is a whole new kind of agency that starts off with all the different assumptions necessary to function on the Net. And that, in turn, will require a wholly different kind of government system. It’s funny how the US government is so friendly to the growth of technology companies and so utterly incompetent in using their products. When the current system collapses, you will see the rise of a new technocracy that ignores a whole swathe of inapplicable assumptions from the old ways. This is coming, so look for it.
