SOPA Signals End of a Free-Information Age We Won't Know We Had Until It's Gone

What concerns me is not the existence of information, as the continuing existence of humanity guarantees we will continue to do and say things of interest. At issue is the limiting of our access to said facts and opinions, and it is a concern that is coming to a head in Washington right now.

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But first some background, as I see it:

First the corporatization and over-monetization of mainstream media outlets turned them into efficient distributors of what the lowest common denominator wants to consume, or what news providers believe they want to or should be consuming.

News was once dominated by the figureheads on the nightly news, household names who decided what we should know. Then we were left to our own devices to parse through the broadcasts and periodicals that defined the news-scape. As the companies that produced those dispatches were bought up by national, then international conglomerates, they became more and more homogeneous.

As an intern covering the U.S. Congress five years ago, I witnessed firsthand the pack mentality that defines the vast majority of modern journalism. Over-worked, underpaid and severely under-supported reporters scramble to report and aggregate all the same stories for their own publications, while real, hard-hitting investigative journalism takes a backseat.

The number of journalists with ever-decreasing amounts of time to spend on enterprise has fallen precipitously in the past couple of decades, but the blow was softened as readership migrated to the Web. In the new media sphere there was less curated, well-funded and professionally vetted journalism, but it was very hard to keep a secret for long.

WikiLeaks blew the lid on thousands of pages of "top secret" files, Reddit, Digg and other websites provided forums for like-minded, engaged individuals to promote the most important, least-appreciated content, and blogs provided sources for alternate viewpoints that would never have otherwise seen the light of publication. The hits went to whoever had something interesting to say the most often, and a quasi-democratization of opinion reigned.

For most of the past decade, this new arena of freedom of speech and less-fettered access to information operated just below the radar of most high-powered politicians, law enforcement authorities, CEOs and other people with the power to effect change.

But as Twitter and other new media outlets fueled the Arab Spring, the elites became concerned, and the crackdown loomed large on the horizon. There was too much freedom to assemble, too much free speech, too much ability to exercise the right to overthrow a tyrannical government.

In America this all came to a head as we witnessed the crackdown on the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations that swept the nation. The government used brute force in a an attempt to scare the citizenry into abandoning its protestations. Didn't work.