Speaking of Blackout

Decades ago, MLK was fighting against people who said “Black, out!”

Today, Wiki, google, WordPress and even the “Marxist Internet Archive” are fighting against SOPA by a “blackout”.

Speaking of the freedom of “knowledge”, my feeling is actually mixed. I share with many of my friends a personal fondness of Wikipedia and an opposition towards SOPA-type acts, yet I will keep my critique against the democratization of knowledge. Democracy could be oppressive ideologically: It is way too easy for socially constructed knowledge to become norms and social pressure, and norms usually come at the cost of the enhancement of human creativity and real innovation. In particular, knowledge can become the soil of “mental shortcuts”, and thus prevent people from thinking from a novel angle. Thus I harbor more doubts against the wiki-style of thinking in real-life than most intellectual people do.

 

Update: an interesting point made by Qingqing in her comment:

SOPA may work in a way that is against your favor: as the wiki protesting webpage argues, SOPA harms small websites more cuz they are more unlikely to be able to afford monitoring cost. In your argument, I guess small sites stand on the side of creativity while big ones represent “norms”.