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                       My 24 Hours in Democracy Essay

                                     by

                               David S. Tweet

The Internet *is* free speech. As soon we develop the technology and
increase the netizen population, we will have what's more incredible than
the equivalent of 1,000,000,000 cable television channels, independantly
owned and operated, broadcasting anything they like to whoever feels like
listening. This is so utterly scary that I don't blame people who don't
understand... or don't want to. The whole problem with kids accessing stuff
their parents don't want them to see is that most parents are uninformed
and underestimate the power of the net. Everything developed too quickly,
what with free aol discs and that. It's too tempting for lots of people to
think of the Internet as either a video game or a newspaper - certainly not
a society. John Perry Barlow, in his Declaration of Independence of
Cyberspace, expounded on the whole notion of the net as an independant
society.

Oh, now I must talk about myself. I turn 16 years old sometime during these
24 hours of democracy. My home is in Salem Oregon; I'm a guitarist, a
beginning programmer(Pascal), and basically addicted to the net. I use an
extra POP account to run a non-automated e-mailing list for musicians, and
I've actually given up on television except for the evening news. I guess
I'm looking for a career in technology.

One of the coolest things I find about the net is that big, important,
mega-sponsored events, such as the Internet World's Fair/World
Pavilion/whatever and 24 Hours in Cyberspace, are so easy to ignore. This
is one way the Internet makes things "right". There is near-perfect
equality in publishing, limited only to a certain extent by affluence
(money buys cool graphics and a domain name).

The Internet is already and will continue to be the best possible forum for
expressing thought, because information goes more-or-less directly from
individual to individual. Anyone with an idea can broadcast it to literally
the entire world for very cheap. Then anyone who is interested has the
ability to feed themselves knowledge. This incredibly fluid thought
activity is something that will change everything, I'm certain. Laws and
standards cannot threaten this. Any standard or law applying to the
internet will be rebelled against, just because ideas are invincible,
unlike people, who can be oppressed, destroyed, etc. in the real world.

Oh, and I think that for the Internet to work in real society, a few things
will have to be done. To make it more of a real-life-social thing, people
will have to quit netsurfing in the work-like solitary atmosphere of
sitting at a desk. People should just get big-screen monitors and remote
control keyboards and mouses. Replace the tv with a monitor! Maybe then
people like me would spend some time in the living room.

Um, sorry for the randomness in this essay, but I guess the beauty of this
whole thing is that I don't have to pass through an editorial board, come
to think of it, through any sort of authority. The CDA is trying to tell me
what I can say and what I can't say, even if no one in the world decides
they want to hear what I say. That sucks.

   * my mind's i/o should be determined by myself.
   * ideas stand on their own merits in cyberspace.
   * bullet lists look better in sets of three.

the end.