subtruth

No need to be deeply versed into contemporary history to realize that the little social progress that was won during the 20th century, through long and hard struggles, is being reduced to less than its shadow within years. Two decades of neo-liberalism have already broadly neutered society, no matter under what flag or with which arguments (“We are in a Crisis, so we have to [blah]“, “We are not in a Crisis, but we need to [blah] to secure ourselves against a coming one.”). With a left-wing opposition stuck in the past, those in power are pushing towards a mix of turbo-capitalism and authoritarian state, which is pretty much the Chinese standard.

The last room of half-freedom we have left is under massive threat by a concerted effort at imposing antidemocratic legislation / binding international agreements. It may be called or be part of ACTA, C11, IPRED2, PIPA, RWA, SOPA or TPP – the aim is the same: often under the assertion of protecting intellectual property (whose exactly?), the basis for an infrastructure of active censorship on the writer’s side or restriction of information on the reader’s side is to be set up. Because the Top has no long-term interest in you being able to do, say and write what you want online, just as well as it has no vision for a future outside of its own self-replication. And indirectly, it is right: i don’t believe the actual system has a future either. Enough signs show it. The question is: do we have to suffer on the way towards its demise?

No, we don’t. But we are heading towards a time when we will have to defend ourselves even more often than now. It is time to counter-attack. There are many ways to do it. One of them is to participate this Saturday 11 February 2012 to the day of action against ACTA. There will be something going on near your place. You should go.

I did my best to keep it short, really.

Edit, Saturday 11.02.2012, 20:30: Wow. This was probably an historic day. Although both media and politicos have failed to even mention ACTA for years, there were over 100K people on the streets of Germany alone. 10K+ in Berlin, in sub-zero temperatures, for a demonstration whose costs were covered through crowd-funding in under 48 hours. And most positively: lots of teenagers. This is awesome and brings hope for the future. Next step: stay alert, keep the pressure up and start thinking about this: if the current copyright laws are no longer relevant for many reasons, what is to think of a political system that creates things like ACTA in the first place?

Have two pictures from Berlin:

This is a spoof of the typical “This video is not available in your country” message that German internet users encounter ever so often on YouTube. The reason for those warnings is a lasting conflict between Youtube and the German collective rights society GEMA over fees, in which GEMA has proven itself unrealistically inflexible.

The crowd at Friedrichstraße, seen from the middle of the demonstration.

Hi city kids! It’s green economical patriotic blog posting time! Since none of you has ever seen any example of that animal the Dude is confounding a nihilistic ferret with and many of you think Swiss people are rich because they stay out of the Euro zone, Uncle Klav is going to educate you with some fresh (in)sights. Now that the world is burning around us, these are essential concerns.

First, and most important: marmots.

Marmot plays sentinel. Can you see it?

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