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A Search For Cyber Freedom

All is quiet on the cyber frontier. Dusk has settled on the desolate landscape that was once a free and prosperous internet. Rumors spread among the masses in high end chatrooms—a place out west where the free-spirit of net neutrality lives on and the bitcoins flow like the raging waters of the Yukon.

“It was slow at first,” an elder speaks. “But when we lost, we lost it all.”

Before, the internet was a place for free thinking and interaction. But when Big Business came to Washington D.C., they acted like alligators. They ripped the web apart and death-rolled the country into paying for what was always meant to be free; carving out the world wide web for themselves.

Protests were rampant. At the beginning, it seemed as though the alligators would never be able to get away with something so blatantly corrupt. But, oh, did they ever.

It came down to one factor and we had nowhere else to go. We were trapped in a labyrinth we built around ourselves. We needed the internet. It became so much of who we were that there was no other way.

No boycotts. No sit-ins. No marching. There was never a good strategy to combat the desolation. There was nowhere to turn to, even though we argued that shutting down your computer and wrapping up wires would be likened to smothering yourself with a pillow and ripping out your own veins.

What were we supposed to do? Walk outside? Read an actual book? Are you kidding? The internet was the world and the world became the internet.

What happens next in our present world? One who has already allowed one pillar to fall. Could we allow it to fall into a lawless frontier of a society where only the rich could enjoy the internet as it was truly intended?

After a day’s search for the promised land, hopeful pioneers sit under the binary code sky and wonder if they could ever get back to such a place. Gathered around a camp firewall, they reside beyond the reach of the Federal Communications Commission hawks and software sheriffs. They told stories of authorized free speech as far as the eye could see and open access to all the world’s knowledge.

As they continued their march, they came across an outcrop of rock.

“There’s free and open internet access in them near hills,” an old roaming hermit declared. “WI-FI Ridge, I tells ya.”

Hiking the terrain was worth it, as they found w—

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