Do We Live At the End of Freedom of Thought?

The human brains living on the earth now are the very last ones NOT to have been influenced by the Internet. We are the last human species, who grew up outside the net. From now on and ever after everybody will be a part of this one huge neural network, we are building. This single nervous system which will embace every single human mind. Our thoughts, plans, dreams, actions, blod pressures, faces and shoe sizes will flow here.
This entails enormous risks. The fate of freedom of thought, human freedom all together, which we have been figting for in centuries, will depend upon the neuro anatomy of the network.
It is not going very well. Actually, if we – the last brains on earth not influenced by the Internet – dont do anything now, we risk having lived at the end of the time, where we had freedom of thought.
Such was the message from professor of law and legal historiy Eben Moglen, when he spoke at re:publica in Berlin in May 2012.
Freedom of mind requires freedom of media and we are not securing that freedom, he believes. We – and every detail about us – are being tracked and mined and stored and used and abused by huge private companies and governments.

Humanity Wired Together
“We grew up to be consumers of media. Now media is consuming us,” he says.
The things we read, read us. The things we listen to, listen to us. Media spy on us, while we are consuming. We are tracked, monitored, predicted by the media we use. The human population is becoming readable.
So, all this means media will eat us, he says. Media tells us what we like and we like it. And media – which must encompass everyone online producing content and tracking us – will spit it all in the government cup, if asked to, and government will criminalize our thinking and reading and use it in criminal cases against us.
“There will never have been any place like it before. Humanity will have all have been wired together. The state will own our mind,” he said.
Mr Monglen believes that one huge mistake is, that we did not build the internet with anonymity built in. IRL we can better control our identity and be anonymous in situations we decide ourselves, just by e.g. reading a paper book. But that is very hard online.
So, he says: “We need free media to have free thinking and that is without being surveilled and monitored.  Having free media means having a network that behaves according to the needs of the people and not to the needs servers in the middle.”
See his scary speech here.