Doc Searls and David Weinberger’s “New Clues: Hear O Internet” Joe Beltz
Hear, O Internet.
It has been sixteen years since our previous communication.

In that time the People of the Internet - you and me and all our friends of friends of friends, unto the last Kevin Bacon — have made the Internet an awesome place, filled with wonders and portents.

From the serious to the lolworthy to the wtf, we have up-ended titans, created heroes,  and changed the most basic assumptions about
How Things Work and Who We Are.

But now all the good work we've done together faces mortal dangers.

When we first came before you, it was to warn of the threat posed by those who did not understand that they did not understand the Internet.

These are The Fools, the businesses that have merely adopted the trappings of the Internet.

Now two more hordes threaten all that we have built for one another.

The Marauders understand the Internet all too well. They view it as theirs to plunder, extracting our data and money from it, thinking that we are the fools.

But most dangerous of all is the third horde: Us.

A horde is an undifferentiated mass of people. But the glory of the Internet is that it lets us connect as diverse and distinct individuals.
We all like mass entertainment. Heck, TV's gotten pretty great these days, and the Net lets us watch it when we want. Terrific.

But we need to remember that delivering mass media is the least of the Net's powers.

The Net's super-power is connection without permission. Its almighty power is that we can make of it whatever we want.

It is therefore not time to lean back and consume the oh-so-tasty junk food created by Fools and Marauders as if our work were done. It is time to breathe in the fire of the Net and transform every institution that would play us for a patsy.

An organ-by-organ body snatch of the Internet is already well underway. Make no mistake: with a stroke of a pen, a covert handshake, or by allowing memes to drown out the cries of the afflicted we can lose the Internet we love.

We come to you from the years of the Web's beginning. We have grown old together on the Internet. Time is short.

We, the People of the Internet, need to remember the glory of its revelation so that we reclaim it now in the name of what it truly is.

Doc Searls
David Weinberger
January 8, 2015

A. The Internet is us, connected
1 The Internet is not made of copper wire, glass fiber, radio waves, or even tubes.
2 The devices we use to connect to the Internet are not the Internet.
3 Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, and 中国电信 do not own the Internet. Facebook, Google, and Amazon are not the Net's monarchs, nor yet are their minions or algorithms. Not the governments of the Earth nor their Trade Associations have the consent of the networked to bestride the Net as sovereigns.
4 We hold the Internet in common and as unowned.
5 From us and from what we have built on it does the Internet derive all its value.
6 The Net is of us, by us, and for us.
7 The Internet is ours.
B. The Internet is nothing and has no purpose.
8 The Internet is not a thing any more than gravity is a thing. Both pull us together.
9 The Internet is no-thing at all. At its base the Internet is a set of agreements, which the geeky among us (long may their names be hallowed) call "protocols," but which we might, in the temper of the day, call "commandments."
10 The first among these is: Thy network shall move all packets closer to their destinations without favor or delay based on origin, source, content, or intent.
11 Thus does this First Commandment lay open the Internet to every idea, application, business, quest, vice, and whatever.
12 There has not been a tool with such a general purpose since language.
13 This means the Internet is not for anything in particular. Not for social networking, not for documents, not for advertising, not for business, not for education, not for porn, not for anything. It is specifically designed for everything.
14 Optimizing the Internet for one purpose de-optimizes it for all others.
15 The Internet like gravity is indiscriminate in its attraction. It pulls us all together, the virtuous and the wicked alike.

[snip]

C. Being together: the cause of and solution to every problem.
116 If we have focused on the role of the People of the Net  — you and us — in the Internet's fall from grace, that's because we still have the faith we came in with.
117 We, the People of the Net, cannot fathom how much we can do together because we are far from finished inventing how to be together.
118 The Internet has liberated an ancient force — the gravity drawing us together.
119 The gravity of connection is love.
120 Long live the open Internet.
121 Long may we have our Internet to love.