Stupid Foreigners

RE: censorship and property

domesticterrorism:

Regarding SOPA and PIPA, it seems to me that everyone is focusing on the draconian, Orwellian, nature of censorship without exploring the reasons it is happening. To me the scariest - and most revealing - part of these bills is their intention. This isn’t arbitrary tyranny for the hell of it. This isn’t the thought police, or some such equally hyperbolic fantasy, trying to keep you “in line;” and this isn’t some “misguided liberal” attempt to curtail free enterprise. This is an attempt to protect the interests of property. 

SOPA/PIPA is an example of how much capitalism relies on the state to protect the existence of property. Without the kind of state coercion on the internet that SOPA/PIPA represents, most information and art has been - to an extent - free to all people. The internet represents a commons, the free use of which is a threat to the profits of property owners. What is happening now is no different from the state-sanctioned assimilation of commonly owned resources for the sake of private interests at the beginning of the industrial revolution.

Most importantly, though, this should be an example of how fascism and corporatism are the direct conclusion to capitalism and concentrated wealth. Where the state does not exist, property will put it there at all costs to protect its interests from that of the public at large. The fight against internet censorship is more than a fight against state coercion, it is a fight to preserve public spaces.

(via of-praxis)