Moron Enterprises

When the Internet first came around it was designed for communication. Email was the first big innovation. With email you could send information to anywhere in the world instantly. After email came instant messaging, popular with the younger generation. New ways to communicate with people were faster and cheaper.

Half a decade later the big push was commerce. Online stores popped up everywhere, and deal and coupon sites followed. They were going to allow consumers to purchase from their chairs at home for no additional cost. Convenience of a department store from the comfort of your home was what was advertised. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work all the time and people overextended their businesses. Everyone was so caught up in the hype that they never stopped to figure out how to ship a single 50 lb. bag of dog food for free. In the end, only a few major players survived the crash.

We’re currently in an Internet phase, where the distribution of knowledge is a major push. Wikipedia sprung up to be a one stop website for all kinds of information. Countless other wiki websites have popped up for more specific topics. Content aggregation sites like Digg and Reddit jumped into the limelight to bring news stories, funny images, and videos from all over the web into a single spot, where they were easily accessible. Now, no matter where content is posted on the Internet, there is an easy way to get to it.

With this knowledge distribution, some new events have come to light. A group, calling itself Anonymous, has decided that knowledge that should be shared includes unearthing misleading practices. They have waged a public war against the Church of Scientology, which is quite secretive about its practices that have been the target of a lot of bad publicity. Feeling that the groups should be exposed, Anonymous has launched a distributed denial of service attack on the Church of Scientology and hacked to obtain internal documents and videos, which are now circulating on the web.

While I don’t agree with using illegal practices to achieve these goals, I do like the end result. Perfect information is an impossibility, but the more aware people are, the better decisions they are able to make. People will be able to make more informed decisions on voting, on purchasing products, and on just about anything they encounter in life.

You still can’t stop stupidity, but the Internet seems to be in a phase to stamp it out as best as possible.