lvlln

Honestly? I’d miss it’s hideousness.

Seriously, the Internet has some of the most vile, hateful, disgusting people in the world, but the thing is, those people have always been around. It’s just now they have a voice.

The Internet is the id of human culture. We say what we want to say, surf what we want to surf, and we do it all without once thinking of the consequences because there generally aren’t many.

We all complain about the idiots on the Internet, but in a way, they’re the best part. They are proof that the Internet is free. Because if any of us had our way, those morons wouldn’t be allowed to post comments or troll forums. Yet they do, and we tolerate it.

Regular society has hundreds of rules that we all obey. On the Internet, there’s really only a handful of rules that we HAVE to obey before the feds intervene. The rest is just optional behavior. It’s like the wild west.

We always idolize the wild west. Why? It was dirty, disease-ridden, hot, and dangerous. None of us would really want to live there. But we love westerns. I think the reason is because we love the idea of a community where law isn’t a piece of paper or a building full of old white guys, it’s one guy with a hat, a horse, and a shotgun. It feels like we’re governing ourselves. There’s creepy and crazy people, but we deal with them on our own terms.

Internet communities are wild and untamed and often every kind of offensive. But we kind of like that about them.

If ISPs and corporations had their way, the Internet wouldn’t be a community of people that range from incredibly intelligent and didactic to deranged and hilarious. It would be a glorified TV/encyclopedia. It would run really efficiently and have all of the core content that we demand, but we would lose that community, that sense of self-governance.

The fact is, if we lost net neutrality, we probably wouldn’t lose most of the things we use the Internet for. As long as there’s a demand for it, there would be a market for it. But we would lose that sense of freedom and (dare I say) adventure.

We often say we “surf” the net. To overextend that saying, if we lost net neutrality, it would probably be more like turning the net into a water park. Same kind of fun, but prepackaged, predictable, and safe.