I sometimes wonder if, one day, we will have to explain to our grandchildren what blogging was. How, in the very early days of the Internet, before a benign and enlightened government taught us that freedom of speech and thought were not a natural thing so basic to humanity that anyone who was denied them would risk hunger, poverty, violence, prison or death to try to obtain them, but a gift that they gave us on the condition that we use it responsibly, and only exercise it with permission in order to agree with the truth as decreed by those in charge, there were people (whisper it, I was one such) who said what they thought, who had unlicensed ideas, who discussed whatever they wanted with others around the world without asking leave of anyone. People who believed that what they thought and what they said was no business of anyone else's, and defended their words not with reference to law but to reason and humanity.Our grandchildren will not believe us. And when we have assured them that it's true, they will think we were wrong to take such liberties, to think for ourselves and try to persuade others of things that we had not been explicitly instructed were right. Blogging will become a dirty thing, practised by zealots, traitors, seditionaries and paedophiles.
This is what the Righteous could achieve. They would farm our minds, they would give us a little licence only so that we might find new ways of beautifying their truth.
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