The internet is angry

The internet is angry. This is because the internet is a spoilt and stupid 15 year old child. It is a child who cannot spell, who confounds categories, who perpetrates fallacies in logic Aristotle never imagined or dreamed of, who is illiterate and uneducated, and behaves in the most high-handed and petulant way if any of this is pointed out. The internet wrote Wikipedia, in fact.

Thus, most of what happened yesterday was nonsense. Andrew Orlowski does get it right, however.

Wikipedia’s blackout has already forced journalists and students into some perverse acts: such as checking facts, reading primary sources, and critically weighing up the opinions of experts. But these childish protests against an unnecessary law could become an annual event unless we address what’s really at stake. This, strangely, is something nobody wants to talk about.
We’ve got a problem. In every field of commerce, except one, money follows popularity. If you sell more fridges or more insurance policies, than anyone else, then you’ll have the most income. On the internet this isn’t true. Payment remains largely optional.
What the anti-Sopa companies – which include large corporations such as Google that benefit from piracy – refuse to admit, is that they [i.e. copyrightholders] are entitled to enforce their rights. Even in the libertarian paradise of Somalia, shopkeepers had to club together to pay the warlords to police against theft.
We certainly owe our grandchildren a world where they can take their talents to market, and not be obliged to whore themselves out to sponsors, making anti-obesity advertisements for the Government, or promotional jingles for Coca Cola. But the internet doesn’t offer us that future. We need to be fixed. The anti-SOPA protests show just how Silicon Valley, the world’s stroppiest teenager, refuses to grow up. It’s a war they like fighting too much to stop.