SOPA: The Final Boss of the Internet.

I don't like discussing political issues.
I usually don't give half a damn what a bunch of self-important folks in ties spend their work hours arguing over at the taxpayer's expense. Funding, legislation, taxes, environmental initiatives, I leave all these kinds of things things to people who understand these things better than me. Because I don't give half a damn.

But then I start hearing about this "SOPA" thing in the US.
If you don't know what it is, this makes a good introduction: 

So. What happens if this passes? Well, I'm not a time traveller, I don't know politics, I don't understand intellectual property law... but I do know the internet.
And we need to understand the internet to understand SOPA.
To some people, "the internet" is just Facebook, an internet subscription is essentially a license to spam people with duck-faced pouty-lip bathroom-mirror pictures and as much as I despise these people, even they will feel the effects of SOPA.
To others, the internet is a research tool. Sites like Wikipedia or even Google allow you to have more or less all human knowledge at your fingertips- thanks to the internet we live in an age where information is free and anyone can just go study up on any damn subject they want, without needing to pay for tuition or have knowledgeable friends. Yep, SOPA will ruin that too. If we allow information to become regulated like this, then knowledge will become a rare commodity, ignorance will run rampant and many serious issues will eventually go un-discussed because nobody knows about them.
To more people, the internet is a career. Not just for the huge corporations who hire one or two people to market things online. Not just for people like Mark Zuckerberg who own multi-million dollar websites. Not just them, but thousands upon thousands of writers, critics, bloggers, webcomic artists, cartoonists, comedians, web game designers, musicians and many more people who add content to the internet. I'm a huge fan of many people whose careers depend on the internet- let's look at some:

Bob "MovieBob" Chipman reviews movies and talks about interesting nerd things on The Escapist. The Escapist pays him and people like him to create content to make their website interesting.. It was a comment in one of MovieBob's videos that inspired me to make a blog, and I aim to be like him. Of course because of the nature of his job, copyrighted materials make up a large majority of his subject matter. You can't review a movie without talking about it and you can't talk about anything you're passionate about without, you know, mentioning it. (Remember, even "Could Superman beat up Darth Vader?" is a discussion of copyrighted material.)
If SOPA passes, this man's whole career can and will end because of it.

On a similar note, The Escapist also introduced me to the LoadingReadyRun crew- these guys have been running an online sketch comedy show since even before YouTube and established several entertaining shows for various websites since. Not only are they some of the greatest comedians of our time- whose work would never even have existed were it not for the internet- but they also started "Desert Bus for Hope"- an amazing annual fundraiser that now raises significant six-figure sums of money for Child's Play- a charity that supports childrens' hospitals.
I should add that Child's Play itself is largely if not entirely dependant on the internet, because they were originally brought to public attention by Gabe and Tycho- the co-authors of massive webcomic Penny Arcade and have over time become the go-to "gamer's charity".
If SOPA passes, LoadingReadyRun, Desert Bus and Penny Arcade will all shut down and its creators rendered jobless.

Hank and John Green (the VlogBrothers) make videos for YouTube. It started as an experiment whereby they spent a year communicating entirely via four-minute videos and from it they've created not just a career but a massive global community of people not only sharing ideas but raising funds for charity and doing more good in the world than a lot of registered charities. These are people who raised the money to charter five planes full of medical supplies to Haiti. These are people who host regular charity drives, stand up for everyone's rights and build wells in third world countries. These are the people that melt away a lot of my normal cynicism by reminding me that there is still good in humanity.
If SOPA passes, not only will the careers of the VlogBrothers be wrecked, the principles of everything they built up and stood for over the years will be destroyed.

What I'm trying to show here is that now, in the 21st century, the internet isn't just a research tool or a communication medium or even a career maker. It's a whole way of life.
It's a culture- not even just one culture but several. The internet is like a whole other country, just not geographically.
And SOPA stands poised to destroy it- to create an age where the corporations have absolute power over what does and doesn't get to exist. Corporations, I might add, that don't like competitors. Corporations that care about little more than their profit margins, and who time and time again have taken cheap shortcuts, provided shoddy or even dangerous service and support, and had the nerve to even blame the consumer for their own shortcomings. Do we really want to give these people serious power over our everyday lives?

I owe the internet. For friends I've made, for things I've learned, for college assignments I've passed, for music I've found, for games I've played... I owe the internet.
And so do you.
Yes you, reading this.
Every single one of us who benefits from free speech on the internet in any way- whether you've made a friend online or you've discovered a band on YouTube or you've read a review of a game or even if you've played Minecraft... the internet has given you something. Now, it is our duty to defend it.

If you're in the US, write to your politicians and congressmen and whatever else. Tell them what the internet has done for you that SOPA would destroy. If you're outside the US, like myself, just do what you can to raise awareness. The more attention this gets, the more likely it is that the internet-ignorant old men in US Congress will be forced to second-guess themselves.

If we don't defend free speech here, then what we will get in the long run is far worse than the Orwellian nightmare. Because it won't even be a government dictating what you think and say. It will be a board of directors and their shareholders.