STICKN' IT TO THE MAN

I'm guessing that the phrase "stick it to the man" originated in 
the USA, some expression of how within the ideal world of 
capitalist freedom individuals still feel their lives formed to the 
benefit of others. It escapes any scary proposals of alterative 
social systems or conclusions about human morality, by focusing 
purely on the individual. It's about finding and exploiting an 
opportunity to avoid a convention that benefits some powerful 
entity at your own expense.

By putting content on Gopher instead of the web, avoiding 
personalised sites like Facebook and hiding it outside the sweep of 
Google's content-fed crawlers, I am "sticking it to the man" in my 
own nerdy way. Equally you are too by reading this. We choose this 
path because we have the knowledge to pursue it, akin to how those 
mechanically skilled might maintain their own vehicle, the 
green-thumbed might grow their own food, and the old ladies might 
knit their own clothing.

However the breadth of skills that apply to the modern life is 
really beyond the grasp of the individual. I've done my best to 
figure out how to maintain a car, armed with a Haynes manual, vague 
help from the internet, and lots of guesswork. But to do so I have 
bought tools that I couldn't possibly have fabricated myself, and 
with the objective of replacing parts that I would have even less 
of a start on replicating from scratch. I cut out one man, only to 
meet the many men who stood behind him.

Here with Gopher it's no different. Sure I've dodged the big 
dot-com giants risen to unrivaled greatness on the back of what 
might be the defining techbology of our century. But I still have 
to pay someone to get this content online, and so do you in order 
to view it, your ISP. While other companies might not be able to 
make money from advertising to you as you try to find or view my 
content, one is charging you simply to access it. By contributing 
to the internet, I am creating more content for ISPs to monetise, 
providing for free the merchandise that they sell.

Now it's not impossible to get past the need for an ISP. There are 
actually a lot of private networks around major cities that use 
wireless communications to share network services between members. 
In theory you could even expand this concept as far as raising 
funds for not-for-profit communication satellites. But still you'll 
be buying the equipment to build your network with - in fact making 
your own silicon chips to construct completely DIY wireless 
networking hardware would probably be as much of a task as building 
your own rocket to launch one of those satellites into orbit.

There's another problem with "sticking it to the man" because when 
we are best at it, it's probably because we're using skills gained 
for our own employment. By necessity these are the skills that we 
best extend and refine, and therefore bring them to a level that 
can practically compete with "the man" while still having time and 
energy to maintain a normal existance within society.

But this likely means that we are in fact contributing to the very 
industry that overall supports "the man". Even if not making money 
for him, we understand the world that he has created, overall we 
_are_ those who created it, and in fact we set out to create it 
just for our own individual benefit.

We are the man.

- The Free Thinker.