The Internet Keeps Dying
Every few years some tired coalition of lobbyists and career politicians figures out a new way to break the internet. This time it’s Article 13—a copyright filter that the EU is about to ram through because tech regulation is too hard and industry lawyers speak louder than anyone else.
The filter would scan everything you upload—video, image, music, meme, remix, whatever—for copyright violations before it ever sees the light. Sounds reasonable if you’re a Sony lawyer. It’s apocalyptic if you’ve ever made anything.
The thing about automated filters is they don’t understand context. A reaction video gets flagged. A song playing in the background of your story gets killed. Fair use doesn’t exist. Parody doesn’t exist. The whole weird anarchic culture that made the internet worth a damn in the first place—fan edits, mashups, commentary, jokes, the constant remix and riff and response—all of it gets smoothed into silence.
I’ve watched people say this won’t happen. That it’ll be fine. That the algorithms are smart enough. They’re not. They’ve never been. And even if they were, we’d just be trading one kind of failure for another—one where the people who built this thing no longer get to decide what they do with it.
The irony is almost perfect. Axel Voss, the CDU politician pushing this, has been sued for copyright violations on his own Facebook page. He’d be the first one flagged by his own filter. But he won’t be. That’s how these things work.
German YouTubers like Gronkh and LeFloid are putting up a fight, and honestly, at least someone is. The petition hit five million signatures. But signatures don’t matter to people who’ve already decided. It takes bodies in the street. Demos. Noise. That’s what killed ACTA. That’s what might kill this, if anyone still gives enough of a shit.
In a few weeks the European Parliament votes. After that, the internet looks different. Not overnight. Just slowly worse. Less strange, less surprising, less made by people who just wanted to make something. More managed. More safe. More dead.