FOURTH ESTATE/FIFTH COLUMN DEPT.

The View offers no screed, only the notice that even NakedCapitalism. com, perhaps the LAST of the grass-roots, clean-talk, expert-hosted, independent, non-profit blog/hubs educating the public, has closed its comment section. I understand why they did. I watched and learned, but never contributed to the scrum. It still hurts, though. With sites like Naked Capitalism not able to keep the barbarians out, how are we then to make a nation?

The future won’t be — can’t be! — found on Facebook, or Google, or iCloud. It can never, ever, again, be on or mediated by any kind of a moneyed, for-profit corporation selling private information and ads. It can never come streaming into your home at the cost of a separate cable fee of 200 dollars/mo. either. It can’t. be. It must be what they used to call, an entitlement. Everybody gets it just for showing up a citizen.

There must be a citizens web, with all of us connected, just as we are now, each with our own little mailboxes and such, but where the encryption is secure from meddling and hacking, because it is not configured for and will not support advertisements, financial transactions, and guarded from mass spamming. We can build web sites and host our pictures — we can host our own pictures, imagine that! — and send e-mail and maybe even vote and participate in civic forums on Zoom-type sites — but it is free of Russian meddling, or barrages of ads and pop ups and financial appeals. In fact, financial appeals would get you kicked off for a time. Rude behavior might get you kicked off for a time. If you say “that’ll never work” I’ll say, rude behavior on the streets is very well enforced indeed costing trillions of dollars a year why can’t a tiny fraction of the money going into keeping bums from peeing on the streets, be used to support robust and secure public internet service?

Another analogy would be the early days of PBS, which really did provide THE BEST CONTENT ON TV for generations, before Newt Gingrich’s Congress killed it by making them all for-profit competitors.

As for your e-commerce and your Amazon and your porn-on-demand and your Bitcoin ponzi schemes and your privacy-flushing clickbait scams and your corporate news videos of jerks who stayed in their hurricane houses ending up on the roof in the lashing storm, with helicopters roaring overhead and wet skirts flying in the downdraft, keep it right where it is for them as wants to click on it. Nothing need change there at all. But if you don’t want any of that, you simply can scroll through your public web connections, looking at photos of your family’s vacation, or reading somebody’s observations of Saturn, or giving attention to and learning from our all the fascinating things our late, lamented, polite/egalitarian/good-behavior when in public, citizenry are thinking and doing.

We have the technology and the thousands of eager-beaver codewriters, and Ol’ Man Tubes’s Barn right here, to build a public, free, Federally secured citizens web in maybe a couple of weeks.

And Mr Zuckerberg can “pivot to Hell” and the disaster-capitalist billionaire-run news media can put its content out on its numerous space-junk satellites and beam it to the Moon, which they’re all so suddenly intent on mining and colonizing anyway…

Well, I guess that was a screed. Forgive me, it’s Monday of maybe the worst week modern America is likely to have had.