Stubborn Independence: Hanging on at the End of the Internet Holocene      
by Chris Floyd     

As you may know, Empire Burlesque was hit by a major hack last night. The culprits were the usual broken, twisted spirits, a gang of what seem to be some kind of Turkish militarists -- at least that's their cover. Their own postings to hacker bulletin boards indicate their intent in wrecking EB is "political." Whether they are operating on their own, or are just thugs for hire, whoring for other entities who might not wish to leave fingerprints, I can't say.

 

Whatever their ultimate provenance, their intention is clear: to shut down political viewpoints they don't like and impose their own, by force. Thus they are the perfect little Terror War minions of the Bush-bin Laden Imperium, having fully imbibed the ethos of this corrupted age.

This hack was probably the worst one yet. They got into the very guts of the blog, and began taking over individual posts, stripping out the original content and replacing it with their incoherent bluster. They were stopped by our intrepid webmaster, Rich Kastelein, who waded in and flayed about him, seizing back control of the site. In the end, they completely destroyed four posts, the last four that I put up. So if you see links to them somewhere out there, they won't work anymore. My apologies for this. I think I can reconstruct some if not all of the posts, and will be doing so throughout the day. [NOTE: The reconstituted posts will appear below this one.]

So that's how we spent Independence Day here at Empire Burlesque. And such attacks are indeed the price of independence -- independence of mind, freedom of thought, the expression of human liberty. Independence disturbs all those of narrow mind and twisted spirit, all those who seek to hold their fragile, frightened, stunted psyches together with a frenzied adherence to some rigid orthodoxy or another, or to the cult of force and brutality. They will always seek to slap down, shut up or simply destroy the liberty of the questing human mind, because this freedom scares and offends them so. They are too weak and too cowardly to bear the existential burden of independence. Some of these pathetic wretches are on the commanding heights of power, waging war and subverting nations; others are hunkered down in fetid basements, tapping out bits of malicious code. All of them are threats to the freedom of the human spirit -- threats to be resisted with all our strength, even as we pity them for their tragic degradation.

As we noted after a previous incident, these hacks on our rather obscure site presage a new, darker age for the blogosphere as a whole. The end of the Internet Holocene is upon us -- that period of clement weather which allowed a whole new culture to flourish, relatively unimpeded. Governments, and their corporate paymasters, are moving relentlessly to seize control of the internet, either by outright censorship, as in China or Iran, or through the heavy hand of Big Money, trying to ghettoize the internet into masses of slow-moving, hard-to-reach backwaters and a few easy-access cash cows, as Vnunet.com reports (via Avedon Carol).

Meanwhile, thuggish bands of cyber-terrorists like our Turkish friends are spreading, their technical acumen every bit as great as their moral idiocy. Criminal gangs too are increasingly sophisticated -- and destructive -- in their internet operations. As in other areas of life, we will see a merging of these upperworld and underworld elements, as the former call upon the latter to do their dirty work, leaving "deniability" intact. Big Money too has little use for independence, idiosyncrasy, the endless variety of human liberty. (For proof, just take a drive across America, and see the numbing sameness imposed on its once-varied and unique regions by corporate culture, and the ubiquitous media echo chamber.)

But liberty is a hardy thing, a stubborn thing, a thorny weed that insists on pushing up through the thickest concrete sidewalk, or the bleakest desert floor. So we'll keep on keeping on, no matter what ghetto they try to herd us into, or how many thugs come around to smash up the place.