The New Wild West

By The Big Guy
Senior Contributor

Do you recognize today’s graphic? If you were in high school during the sixties or seventies or eighties or nineties, it should have jumped right out at you. Need a hint? Cliffs Notes. Okay, I was never very good at giving hints. No time to waste, which is of course the very raison d’être for Cliffs Notes.

But let’s not forget that we now reside in the twenty-first century. Things are different. Lots of things. I’m not just talking about the fact that televisions don’t need to “warm up” anymore. I’m talking about the fact that if you don’t want to read War and Peace or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Animal Farm, you don’t need to rush out and pick up a copy of the Cliffs Notes the night before the book report is due. You can sit down at your computer or any other Internet capable device you may have around the house and go any number of places, like Wikipedia, and put yourself together something certainly C+ worthy without ever cracking the binding of a book…or a booklet with black and yellow stripes on the cover. 

That is unless your book report was due today, because yesterday Wikipedia along with several other websites went dark for the day in protest of new legislation. Media moguls are attempting to get Congress to pass a law that will enable them to have anyone stealing music or movies or TV shows put to death. Apparently, this is because all Americans want to do is steal music and movies and TV shows. Personally, given the opportunity, I would much rather pay for my movies and music and TV shows and steal gasoline instead.

We all use the web every day and we seem to have it sort of under control. It’s a wild west sort of under control, but for now it works. There’s commerce. There’s convenience. There’s knowledge. There are government services. There’s porn. There’s good (i.e., blogging) and there’s evil (i.e., facebook). But somehow it all works.

Of course the media boys, the ones poor-mouthing to their pals in the Capitol city have been complaining about all the money they’ve been losing since some guy figured out how to line up a bunch of 1’s and 0’s on a little silver disc late in the twentieth century. They need to realize that things have changed. Perhaps their cocaine budget has been depleted but the money is still pretty darn good. They should talk to the guy who put his kids through college printing telephone books.

When the traffic light on the corner stops working, people usually manage to work things out. Pedestrians and drivers all get where they’re going without mishap or much delay. But things always seem to come to a standstill when someone sends a cop over to handle the traffic until the light is fixed. The backup instantly doubles and horns start honking. Let’s not be throwing unnecessary cops at the Internet. For now, we’re doing just fine.