Monday, January 17, 2011

Information, the 21st Century Liquor: Modern Day Prohibition

Information is an incredibly dangerous and highly valuable thing. Civilizations can be built or destroyed just because someone had the right information and someone else lacked it. It is the nature of government to try and control anything which they see as a tool, and to be rid of anything they see as a threat. Unfortunately for many world governments, as the world becomes more enshrined in the so-called “information age”, more and more people worldwide are becoming globally aware. This makes it a wonderful time for innovation and growth, but a nightmarish time for governments trying to censor and stop the free flow of information. As with American slavery and prohibition before it, information censorship is becoming a major cause of innovation and popular unrest in the modern age. People all across the world are more connected today than ever before thanks to the internet, and now thanks to hand held electronic devices like smart phones, people expect to be connected to the global media consciousness 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. As this expectation spreads even into the most heavily censored and government controlled regions, people the world over are joining the global community at a rate which shows that very shortly, the governments of the world may not be able to police the trafficking of information as well as they have been able to in the past, if they are still able to at all.

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