The unforeseen consequences of technology have given humanity a pretty hard time. The massive troop charges into machine guns in World War I seem to be an appropriate poster child for our collective inability to comprehend the most obvious effects of technological advancement, symbolizing how much physical suffering and death it actually takes for a cautionary message to get across at all.
    
Today, humanity shambles forward just as blindly as ever. With information technology exploding at a rate of change no area of human endeavor has ever seen, being vigilant about the effects of pervasive new digital technology is hardly paranoia. At the turn of the millennium the Internet still had all the innocent novelty of the dot-com boom and bust. It caused quite a stir: Some people were actually making some money off of their websites in the stock market — like a real business or something! Adorable. Now a search engine all but commands the commercial element of a near global infrastructure that we depend on as much or more than the highway system to live our lives.
    
While our interaction with this digital infrastructure is more complicated and includes many more players than a car on the highway, our adaptation to it and reliance on it is no less evident. Whereas the consequences of the car include CO2 pollution and injury or death caused by travel at speeds we didn’t evolve to collide at, the consequences of communication and information technology can be predicted by how it mingles with our biology.
    
It’s been modestly publicized that using fully data-planned smart phones has odd effects on the brain. The brain has evolved to unconsciously anticipate activity that originates from places it has learned are relevant to survival; it’s as simple as early humans having to anticipate movement or sound in the distance that could belong to prey or predator. Studies on the effects of texting in teenagers, arguably the first demographic to fully embrace the new method of communication, concluded that the social anticipation combined with the chemical reward that came with receiving, opening and replying to the message was what made it so addicting. Smart phones, as an all-inclusive platform for all modern mediums of communication, take that subconscious formula and multiply it many, many times; a crippled ability to be in the moment and retain newly learned ideas are just a few documented consequences of long-term use.
    
My point is, people are OK at adapting, but we make huge mistakes, and the potential for error has never been greater: The deceptively gradual speed and scope with which the Internet has replaced huge segments of our culture has perhaps stunted the level of discourse conducive to full understanding and appreciation of this phenomenon — until recently. The SOPA and PIPA controversy, those badly veiled motives of paid-for legislation and the subsequent outrage of the masses, has had the overwhelmingly positive effect of getting people to comprehend what life would be like without this, no, our, abstract global network.
   
 There’s never been a better time to wax poetic about the old ’Net. The Internet is now indistinguishable from culture, that peculiarly human way we tend to organize existence so we don’t go insane — on a truly free and global level. It is the air, it is human potential made effortless and free, defeating classic barriers like geography, distance and language. But it is no longer free from the consequences of its own success. Hours after SOPA was scrapped, Kim Schmidtz, founder of the Megaupload file-sharing site, has been arrested and sentenced by the American government with jail time longer than many rape-murders.
    
The precedent has been set, legislation or no, and the legislation will not stop coming — but let’s achieve some perspective, here. The old media empires are and have been crumbling. They’ve already lost to the Internet, and obtuse copyright law is the last option these idiots have to swing things back in their favor. The fortunes of the modern day have not been made on the back of copyright law — they’ve been made harnessing the natural freedom of this new frontier, and they will continue to. Find the list of SOPA sponsors and supporters (Viacom, the NFL, Ford) and find comfort in the fact that while none of them make most of their money on the Internet, you can bet that the extra cash they had lying around to sponsor SOPA with was gained by some meaningful pursuit of online advertising (Google). These buffoons benefit fully from the uninterrupted traffic of a pristine and flourishing Internet ecosystem, and whatever losses they try to allocate to file sharing will only be multiplied by forcing a legal framework in place where such a thing can’t even be sustained. Our entire domestic economy is moving to the Internet and isn’t looking back, and the claim that TV can remain profitable being autonomous from the Internet is the most hilarious pretension I’ve ever heard. But we should boycott them anyway.


— Wiley Robinson is a junior in ecology and environmental studies. He can be reached at rrobin23@utk.edu.