Communism and the internet

[CommunityBeliever]

There are a lot of similarities between the intended structure of the Internet and communist society:



Global extent: just as the Internet is spread across the entire planet, the international proletariat will create communism across the entire world.
Cooperative networking: the Internet is a network of interacting peers without any central authority or power hierarchy. Similarly, communist society is a distributed network of individuals with no central authorities, states, ruling classes or coercive hierarchical relations.
Gift economy: information such as books, music, videos, and software can be downloaded for free over the Internet. Similarly, in communist society there is no money or scarcity so you can get whatever you want for free.

Unfortunately, the capitalists are anti-internet. Supporters of the information gift economy are denounced as "pirates" which implies that people that share information are comparable to people that attack ships on the open sea. The capitalists are using a variety of measures such as patents, copyright, and DRM to introduce artificial scarcity and thereby destroy the information gift economy. Furthermore, centralised social networking companies such as Facebook are actively working to replace the cooperative network with a controlled system whereby you have go through central servers for all your transactions.

The dotCommunist Manifesto - Eben Moglen - Columbia University (http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/my_pubs/dcm.html)

[NGNM85]

While authoritarian institutions are trying, desperately, to limit the ability of citizens to access, and exchange information, and we should be ever vigilant in defending against that, I think there's a lot of reason to be optimistic. To date; the efforts to build digital blockades, and firewalls has been, overall, a pathetic failure. It's like trying to hold on to sand. The tighter they squeeze; the more it slips through their fingers. One of the primary bulwarks of authoritarianism, historically, has been this control of the dissemination of information. With the emergence of the World Wide Web, and the proliferation of cheap computers, and cellular phones, our technology has evolved to the point where that kind of control is, simply, no longer possible. For this reason; the internet is inherently democratizing. It is an unparalelled tool for activists, and organizers. Internet activism, and organizing has played a significant role in the uprisings in the Middle East, and in the Occupy Wall Street movement, here, in the United States. Oppressors be warned; this is only the beginning.