[119198] in Cypherpunks
Re: Why governments fear the Internet.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jean-Francois Avon)
Tue Oct 19 14:34:36 1999
Message-Id: <199910191811.OAA11813@cti06.citenet.net>
From: "Jean-Francois Avon" <jf_avon@citenet.net>
To: "Breitkreuz Hon. Gary MP" <Breitkreuz.G@parl.gc.ca>,
"QuackGrass.com" <qgrass@quackgrass.com>,
"Paul Richards' - Offshore Haven Newsletter" <office@offshorehaven.nu>,
"Patriot on Guard" <kyburz@telusplanet.net>,
"N. King at Standup New-Zealand" <standupnz@clear.net.nz>,
"Freedom Party of Ontario" <feedback@freedomparty.org>,
"eZola@LFCity.com" <eZola@LFCity.com>,
"Canada Protest Page" <tpg@witty.com>,
"Parkinson Sid" <sid@stlawrenceinstitute.org>,
"Ralph C. Maddocks" <saesnig@login.net>,
"=?iso-8859-1?q?Le_Qu=E9becois_Libre?=" <ql@quebecoislibre.org>,
"Lemieux Pierre" <pl@pierrelemieux.org>,
"Desrochers Pierre " <desrocp@ere.umontreal.ca>,
"Kelly-Gagnon, Michel" <mkellygagnon@iedm.org>,
"Pellerin Brigitte" <pouf@netrover.com>,
"Bob Bitchin at At & Latts" <publisher@seafaring.com>,
"Cypherpunks" <cypherpunks@toad.com>
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 14:05:47 -0400
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Reply-To: "Jean-Francois Avon" <jf_avon@citenet.net>
On Tue, 19 Oct 1999 11:09:24 -0400, a friend who confided his ramblings wrote:
>The Internet
>is now, according to them, spreading ideas in minutes, hours,
>days.
>Time was when an individual stood out as an oddball, long or short
>or no hair, clothing set them apart, no longer. We can and are
>becoming not groups, but individuals with the means of
>communication and able to spread our ideas to to others very
>quickly, BUT other people can accept them %100, accept part of
>these ideas, or discard them totally, their choice. Suddenly,
>people have a choice.
>We are, will, become "individuals" once more, if we ever were.
>Governments fear this, as does organised religions. In fact, the
>"elites", their word, not mine, fear us the most as they have the
>most to lose.
>We become "more" than we were, not merely taxpayers. A nation of
>free thinkers is dangerous according to the state, the old method
>of controlling people, these no longer work, or soon will not.
>Interesting, this time the media is not the message, but the
>content is the message. The media is simply the carrier of the
>message. Maybe it always was. I saw it that way anyway.
May Marshall MacLuhan rot in hell... "The media is the message" means the
same thing as "the pipe is the water". What de-construction of the concept of
being!
>So we DO have power, or soon will have, not by seizing political
>control at the ballot box, but by influencing public opinion and
>educating the masses through the Net.
>For us, the important thing is the time frame, remember, days,
>hours, minutes can change the direction of the mind set of large
>amounts of the populace.
>When I was very young, we had no electricity in the public halls,
>dances, political speech's etc. were all sans amplifier. We spoke
>to crowds, and had to have a strong voice, and sang at parties,
>again, no amp's. We relied on face to face visits during election
>campaigns to ask people to vote for us, one on one almost. I know
>this is hard for the younger set to imagine, but even Don Messer
>had no amplifiers, I knew the man who worked on his first one, it
>was a one tube affair, a Rogers. Probably one or two Watts output
>max. I assure you, ideas did not travel fast. We had battery
>operated radios, and in winter we scrimped with the listening time
>to save the power. NO AA or AAA batteries, these were
>dry cells, weighed about ten pounds two large ones and one smaller
>one for the bias, which I learned later in engineering school,
>drew little if any current. Another aspect is we threw these old
>batteries anyplace we could when they went dead, talk about
>pollution.
>I asked my brother to send me a grease cup from the farm he told
>me there still are lots of old machinery laying around in the
>woods back home. Sad. Antifreeze oil, gas , you name it.
>Anyway, welcome to the new world order, fellow individuals.
