Take a look around you. Half of your household items, including things you hold most dear, are hooked in the cloud. We are living in perhaps the most revolutionary time in our history where the old world of nation-states with strict organizational charts dies and a new world arises. Spontaneous order, the only game in town, evolves continuously out of the desire of people to know and connect.
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As Eric Schmidt said, "the internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had." We are still discovering what is going on around us. Even if people belong to political parties and uphold a statist state of mind, we see anarchic attitudes rising everywhere. We all belong to different sites, different groups and forums without pledging allegiance to any of them. We invest our time and money in different areas. Our actions are very much anarchic because this state of functioning is much more efficient for all of us.
We live in the cloud. We communicate, network and contact our business. We keep in touch with our friends and meet our life partners. We share what we know and manage our futures. No person in particular is responsible for all these. We all contribute in random and unexpected ways, make mistakes or triumphs, shaping our future one click at a time. What a great time to be alive. Random but entropically elegant.
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Yet, most of us are still imprisoned in the old ways. The analog-age governments are still hijacking our minds, manipulating our sense of safety and control. Afterall, we are teleological beings that picture our existence at the center of all things. If people really understood the implications of the digital cloud revolution, everyone would bail out of the illusion of government regulation.
Even if governments try to control the internet much like they are doing in the physical world, freedom slips through the cracks. Trying to regulate the internet is much like trying to tax oxygen. It is futile. The innovation of digital interconnectedness has given civilisation another chance in survival after making so many blind mistakes in the past. Mistakes that could have been prevented. Things like organised religions and devout patriotism come to die in the internet because people know what lies in the other side of the fence. In the past the mind was forever jailed in an ideological prison; today, every individual has a window to the world.
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The state is nothing more than the manifestation of people’s fears and insecurities. People come together and sacrifice freedom for the sake of safety. Sadly, we end up with neither. The population becomes despairing, hopeless, and weighted-down. Regulation imprisons creativity and kills spontaneity. This is true across all domains of human affairs. Try to be predictable and stable in any human relationship and everyone, including yourself, will lose interest. Regulation is not in our nature. Nature laughs at regulation. Regulated, state zombies don’t really do anything. They are predictable, categorizable, pliable and ultimately dispensable. People in this mental shackle offer no surprises, bring up no challenge, and rarely revolt. This is a wet dream for bureaucrats and plutocrats alike. Divide and conquer both in body and spirit. This is the machine of human slavery. A machine built and operated by our primitive fears. A machine that is being challenged like no other time in history by the idea of the internet.
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We have taken the red pill. We shape our future, daring to break bad, challenge, disagree, innovate and overthrow. We all act towards this revolutionary future. Our shepherds are watching the sheep breaking free but they too are letting go, riding the wave along with everyone else. The prison we are in right now is just a state of mind. The internet is anarchy in practise whether we like the term or not. Indeed a very fortunate time to be alive.
