Motus Mentis

Well, the Apocalypse is upon us: the FCC has voted to repeal the Obama-era “Net Neutrality” regulations. This means that the Internet we’ve all come to know and love is finished, over, kaput.

The services you love — Google, for example, or perhaps some crotchety old geezer’s curiously named and depressing blog — will henceforward only be available to corporate bigwigs, Russian oligarchs, trust-fund playboys, corrupt politicians, cisgendered white males, and other oppressors of the downtrodden. While they’re all chilling with Netflix and checking streaming updates of their stock portfolios, we’ll be scrounging old magazines from the trash and reading the backs of cereal boxes. While the fat-cats are flying down the fast lane, the “rest of us” will be inching along, bumper-to-bumper. Women will no longer have any way of getting the abortions that are a defining condition of modern femininity.

Get ready, folks. If you want to get online, it’s going to cost you big. And if you have something to say, well, chances are you aren’t going to be allowed to say it. Freedom? Equality? The American Dream? Happiness? Fair play? Truth? Justice? Hope itself? Kiss ’em all goodbye, amigos. The Internet is going to be wide-open to the free market.

Imagine this, if you can: The government will not be in control.

Very grim times are ahead. Those of you who are old enough to remember the horrors of an unregulated Internet — it was two years ago, too far back for most Americans to have any recollection — will know what I mean.

As for this blog: I will soldier on until darkness falls. I may be able to keep things going for days, or even weeks — who can say?