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February 1996

The net is not American.
It is global.

Although it's self-evident that the US constitutional courts will strike down those clauses in the CDA that threaten freedom of speech, it's also self-evident that the legislators -- and the president who signed the bill into power -- are dangerously ignorant about the very thing they are trying to regulate with their "deregulation."

A reminder: The 'net was designed to survive nuclear holocaust, built to be a perpetual motion machine that can never be shut down, and conceived with the need for a method of communication that can not be censored, lest it fail to fulfill its original purpose -- make sure that in case of a nuclear war, the missiles will still fly.

Luckily, thankfully, perhaps divinically, the 'net evolved from that key tool of the Mutually Assured Destruction policies of the 60s, 70s and 80s, to become the platform for the free marketplace of ideas in which the next century's global economy will be built. As such, it is our guarantee that knowledge will indeed be victorious over superstition, and that the essential pragmatism of the Golden Rule will indeed replace tribalist fundamentalism and racial superiority theories, so that that democracy will continue to spread across the planet.

The net is not American. It is global. It helped bring down the Soviet Union by making it possible for those connected to know even before Mikhail Gorbachev that there was a nuclear disaster in Chernobyl.

As an expatriate American, I can only mourn the ignorance of its current political leadership, and hold onto the hope that the net's usefulness as a tool for the dissemination of knowledge, will prove to be the greatest weapon in the battle for global democracy -- and peace.
By Ariga Editor Robert Rosenberg

24 hours of free speech on the internet logo Twenty-Four Hours of Democracy on the Net:

This was a mystical experience for many who took part in "Coool" Dave Winer's proposed chain of essays by netizens who wanted to express their feelings, thoughts and experiences about the inalienable right of all netizens to Free Speech.

The following article was Ariga's contribution to the event that took place for 24 hours in cyberspace through the spontaneous creation of a chain of links, a web of webs, and lists of listservs, protesting against the political ignorance attempting to censor the net, affirming the right to free speech for all.

Ariga will be continuing the chain if you want to contribute. Send your article to Ariga to join the chain. Here's a list of many, if not all the sites known to be linked as of Feb 24.

Posted at Ariga on Feb 21 1996