Please humor me for a moment put on your conspiracy hats, and imagine the following…
Trade Unions under the guise of ‘fair trade’ create a North American Superstate. The EU itself becomes more and more of a government itself, the individual countries increasingly losingly sovereignty. Similar things occur elsewhere in the world, until either by war or slow concessions there is truly one world government. Maybe it comes about some other way, but this is the most likely way I see it happening.
Repeatedly, for every possible crisis there is an expansion of government intervention. As it has always been before. Eventually, possibly under the guise of ‘political correctness’ or ‘hate speech’, regardless of the possibility of the government to do so, the government begins to put a net on the free speech of the internet. And in a style akin to Fahrenheit 451 and the U.S.S.R., and in a tale told to us by Hayek, civil liberties are again curtailed.
tl;dr, the government takes over everything everywhere.
What would you do? I would like to say I would continue to try and fight back, but at that point it really begins to look like “a boot stamping on a human face— forever”.
The government cannot control the internet. The system was designed to withstand a nuclear attack, and that was before the advent of wireless and mobile computing.
In such a scenario, you’d have to try and tear down the system from the inside.
Needless to say, a society where the governmenr controls everything means that private citizens will be too poor and defenceless to revolt by themselves.
Computers today ship with server and client software installed. Most computers have the capacity to transmit and receive wirelessly now. Setting up nodes and mini-nets is very easy. As much as the government tries, it cannot stop the march of progress.
Do I really have to point this out? Come on, guys.
Central planning and control is inherently unsustainable. Doomed to fail. Even if a revolution can’t bring it down, sooner or later its own wastefulness and incompetence will reduce it to a state of powerlessness equal to that of its “subjects,” at which point its “subjects” will cease to be subject to anything.
In any case, I don’t think we need to wait for the state to fail of its own accord. Look at the explosion of the libertarian movement in the past couple years, especially thanks to the Ron Paul campaign. I have many friends that became a libertarian directly because of listening to Ron Paul in the debates, Googling “Ron Paul” thanks to all the viral campaigning we did, and researching Austrian economics.
I think the two fastest growing ideological constituencies in the world right now must be hardcore libertarianism and hardcore socialism. One is inherently doomed to failure, and one’s not.
Fephisto has some valid concerns. Even if everything looked bleak, I wouldn’t want to give in. Give me liberty or give me death!
As for the Internet, I suggest we brush up on our literacy of open-source software, encryption techniques, and steganography. Failing that, we could boycott computers altogether and use carrier pidgins.
Won’t those fascists look stupid if they put all that trouble into censoring the Net, and then people just stop using it!