Hmmmm, looks like I’m getting about forty instances of the SoBig virus per hour. Gee, that’s just what I bought a computer for.
At the moment, the viruses seem to be beating out the spam in the Battle of the Sociopathic Assholes.
Unfortunately, the only losers seem to be me. And you.
It appears that last week’s virus knocked out the safety monitoring system of a nuclear power plant
Yet there are those in some circles who would say that this is a good reason to shut down nuclear power plants rather than virus writers.
No, this is why you need law, and law enforcement.
Freedom is not “I can do anything I want.” That’s not freedom. That’s anarchy. That’s rule of the jungle.
Freedom is “I can do what I want consistent with the rights of others.” What are those rights? That’s what we have constitutions and bills of right and laws, to define those rights.
There always has to be some form of “law” in a society. Even a society of saints follow rules.
We don’t live in a society of saints, so laws have to be engraved on paper rather than hearts. And then they need to be enforced against those who will not otherwise obey.
This is not to say there cannot be bad laws, but bad laws do not remove the need for law, no more so than bad people remove the possibility that good people exist.
The Emergence of Globohole
Many of those present at the creation of the Internet thought it a new, unspoiled frontier, a place that did not need the laws of an old, corrupt society. A place of freedom.
Well, now we see what this kind of “freedom” gets you. A beehive for sociopathic bees, a laboratory of what happens when “me” rules. It’s not better than the real world; it’s worse.
It has not worked. It isn’t working. It could have never worked. No society can work with a bunch of “me”s.
Take the spammer. He just wants the freedom to do whatever he wants, to get sales. So does the virus writer, to feel important. So does the P2Per, to get freebies.
They’re all part of the same phenomenon.
What does the Internet do better than just anything else? It massively empowers assholes. I’m serious. Popeye and his spinach looks like a vitamin supplement in comparison.
Take your typical walking-around jerk. Before the Internet, he could only impose his anality on those within his immediate vicinity. Thanks to the Internet, though, assholes now have global reach, global power. No longer the local jackass, we now have Globohole.
Take a bunch of Globoholes and put them in a peer-to-peer (how ironically fitting) network, and well . . . .
In all these cases, though, freedom starts and ends at home. It is others who have to pay the price of their “freedom.”
Note something else about all these “freedoms.” They’re all parasitical; they cannot live on their own. They have live off something else, and the exceptions just prove the rule. They all involve the freedom to take from others; their time, their energy, their money.
The freedom they want is the freedom to leech off others.
The answer to these “freedoms” is simple and inevitable. The Internet is too valuable a tool to allow that kind of “freedom.” So it will be crushed, just like the “freedom” of the Wild West was crushed a century ago.
It won’t be done in a day or a year, and even after this West is won, there will be criminal nooks and crannies. But “freedom” will end.
And this will be a good thing.
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