One Last Time — "Net Neutrality: What It Is & Why You Should Care"

Man, aren't you going to be so happy when I stop posting / talking / raving like a lunatic about this, and it's all become a distant memory of the past, a "haha remember that time the government was going to allow corporations to control the flow of information access and eviscerate our society hahaha good times bro" rather than becoming a HORRIBLE DYSTOPIAN FUTURE that we'll all be forced to live in?

Of course you are. Today's your last chance to make your voice heard before Congress and the FCC reconvene to discuss these newly proposed laws. So if you haven't taken action yet, this is my final attempt to make you change your mind. After that, it's back to your regularly scheduled programming of indie rock bands and geek culture and other obscurely insular humors. That is, unless I find another political topic du jour to be passionately outraged about. Who, me? Nahhh...

And in case you somehow missed this, to sum it all up...

An Open Letter From Netflix To Verizon For Being A Bunch Of Greedy Selfish Jerks

Continuing in the modern trend of a never-ending ouroboros of open-letters, Netflix has sent a letter to Verizon about the letter that Verizon sent to Netflix about how angry Verizon was that Netflix was throwing them under the bus and blatantly telling its customers that their slow-loading time were entirely the fault of Verizon trying to throttle internet service (an unfortunate omen of the world to come, should Net Neutrality laws be abolished).

Net Neutrality Explained With Basic Stick Figures & Do You Finally Understand Why This Is So Serious?!

Did I mention that Comcast has already begun discussing plans to limit your monthly broadband consumption and thereby prevent you from binge-watching your favorite shows on NetFlix? 

If you're still having trouble extrapolating how this is an issue, consider how the narrative structure of television continued to evolve in response to our binge-watching habits. I'm not here to argue about whether or not we are in a "Golden Age of Television" right now, but the truth is, there are some pretty great shows out there right now. The expectations have been raised, as narratives have matured. Networks used to prefer sitcoms because they had a better chance of new viewers tuning in every week. But now, with fewer people relying on live broadcasts, it's changed the way that we interact with TV shows — with episode pacing, exposition, serialized story details, etc. — and those narrative structures will continue to change and evolve. 

That is, unless Comcast starts to restrict your bandwidth. Then you only get about 70 hours of streaming a month (to say nothing of the data limitations on the millions of other things you do online). If that happens, then not only are you less inclined to catch up on Game of Thrones, but the writing team on Game of Thrones is less inclined to create quality programming that really grabs you because it's more financially viable for them to create formulaic programming instead, thereby returning television to the "Boob Tube" status of audio-visual brainwashing instead of a compelling narrative medium*.

Perhaps more importantly, if Comcast begins to limit streaming, then my fiance won't be able to listen to Law & Order: SVU every night in order to get to sleep. "How does Law & Order: SVU help her get to sleep," you ask, "when it's a procedural show that mostly consists of horrible, horrible acts of rape and violence against women? Doesn't that give her nightmares or something?" Look, man, I don't understand it either. But if it works for her, then it works me, and then everyone wins, because everyone gets to sleep, so everyone's happy.

DO YOU HEAR THAT, FCC?! MAINTAIN NET NEUTRALITY SO THAT I CAN SLEEP IN PEACE.

*Some folks would argue that binge-watching is in fact the greatest accomplishment of television brainwashing, and that we're even worse off now than we were before. They're probably right, and I'm probably so brainwashed at this point that I'm blindly spouting propaganda in their favor. Oh well. 

#StopTheSlowLane

As far as I'm concerned, Net Neutrality is up there with Climate Change under "Hugely Important Issues That Are Actual Realities (and of which most sane and educated acknowledge the existence) and We Seriously Need To Act On Them Immediately Before Our Entire Society Goes Kablooey," especially now that cable lobbyists have strong-armed Congress into signing a new anti-Net Neutrality petition as of yesterday.

This is a weird catch-22, because I care a lot about Net Neutrality and want to do my part to make more people aware of it. So I tried installing one of these widgets from StopTheSlowLane.com onto my website here, which essentially replicate what would be the experience of using a website (like mine) if the proposed Internet laws were to be passed. The only problem was, it made the experience of using the site incredibly obnoxious — which is precisely why it's an important issue to be aware of, but also would probably deter the little bits of traffic I'm already barely getting on this site. See what I mean by a catch-22? Luckily, there's the GIF up there (linked to more information about Net Neutrality) which gives an impression of A World Without Net Neutrality without actually slowing the load time on my site. In the end, I don't have enough faithful readers (hi everyone!) that there'd be any real benefit to show for giving you all such a frustrating on my website.

Here's Cory Doctorow, one of my Clarion mentors, explaining it in a recent column for The Guardian:

Anyway. That's all for today. Fight the power, save the Internet.