About this: "Taylor is a 21st-century digital dissenter. She’s one of the many technophiles unhappy about the way the tech revolution has played out. Political

About this: "Taylor is a 21st-century digital dissenter. She’s one of the many technophiles unhappy about the way the tech revolution has played out. Political progressives once embraced the utopian promise of the Internet as a democratizing force, but they’ve been dismayed by the rise of the “surveillance state,” and the near-monopolization of digital platforms by huge corporations." I recall many years ago I would sometimes write comments at places like Slashdot. And I recall pointing out that so long as governments have armies that can find ways to be repressive. I recall being down modded as if I was some kind of irrational troll. At that time, and in those forums, the people who got upvoted were the ones who made the argument that the Internet could never be censored, because the Internet would route around censorship as if censorship was a form of network failure. During that era, a lot of people made some fairly naive libertarian/utopian arguments about the Internet was changing the world. Some people still make these arguments even now. There were some places (I'm thinking of places such as BoingBoing) where the utopian editorial tone was the only tone that was allowed. Places like BoingBoing have gotten much better at documenting the ways that governments are undermining the Internet, but many of these places started off denying that such undermining could ever happen. I am happy that these people finally revised their view of the world, though I wish the dangers had been more widely appreciated at an earlier date. The reality we face is now much as it has always been: there is no technological solution for repression. The only way to establish a free society is to mobilize and fight for it. That was true 2,500 years ago, when the Plebians were demanding fair treatment from the Roman upper classes, and it remains true today, and it will probably remain true for as long there is a species that you can recognize as homo sapien.