Originally published at The Atlantic

Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, opens a bag of Cheetos with his teeth, dumps them onto a hipster food-court lunch bowl, and slathers it in Sriracha sauce. He snaps a pic for social media.

It’s a scene from a video, “Seven Things You Can Still Do on the Internet After Net Neutrality,” shot by the conservative outlet The Daily Caller and published Wednesday, the day before the Federal Communications Commission voted to gut rules to treat internet traffic equally. Besides “’gramming your food,” Pai also assures The Daily Caller’s readers they will still be able to take selfies, binge watch Game of Thrones, cosplay as a Jedi, and do the Harlem shake.

Net-neutrality proponents have lambasted the video, and with good reason. A federal appointee charged for stewardship of public communications infrastructure comes off as insolent.

Even so, there’s something undeniably true about the video, which has only been amplified by reactions to the FCC’s vote: The internet that net neutrality might protect is also a petri dish of the pettiness and derision Pai acts out in the video. In addition to being a public good that ought to be regulated, the internet is also an amplifier of panic, malice, and intemperance. Like it or not, those vices helped get the nation into the political moil it currently faces, from internet policy to immigration to taxation to health care—as well as to the validity of elections themselves.The most important step for the future of the internet, for citizens, politicians, and corporations alike, is to calm down, research, and debate its future. But the internet’s nature might make that impossible.continue reading at The Atlantic

 

published December 15, 2017