NY Tech Meetup + others Protest SOPA

I’ve been on an unintentional hiatus for over a month now. I didn’t even realize it had been that long. I have been focusing most of my energy on either personal stuff or my photography website, Pro Fotos On Shuffle. You can find portions of my latest photo project there.

“Does this mean you’ve given up on the blog?” you might be asking now. Or maybe you don’t really care. Why you would be reading this if you didn’t care is beyond me, but to each his own…

Whether you care about this space or not, I would imagine you care about some portion of the internet, or you wouldn’t be here right now. The internet is this indefinable space where ideas spread like wildfire. It’s also something we take for granted as being a safe place for these ideas to form and grow. It is a place for creativity and innovation and freedom. It is also a space that is under attack now, and the saddest thing of all is that a large portion of its inhabitants have not even noticed. That is, at least, until now…

Today various corners of the internet, including reddit, Wikipedia, and Google, gathered together to bring awareness to those who might not have noticed that the freedom they enjoy on the internet is currently being threatened by legislation that could be horribly abused by the wrong people. There was also a physical protest hosted by NY Tech Meetup, which I also attended. My camera was, sadly, dead to the world, but thanks to the powers of technology I was able to capture some of the protest on my iPhone.

SOPA and PIPA may be things the reddit community and other more techie individuals have been familiar with for some time now, but it has not been a largely mainstream issue. My hope is that after today this becomes no longer true, and people start to take notice and do something to protect the freedom that should be guaranteed by all internet dwellers.