Perverjiariazing Jesus' Internet

Perverjiariazing: perverting while plagiarizing

When a Massachusetts publisher reprinted Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer without bothering to pay Twain any portion of the income, that was plagiarism: or pirating: theft. It wasn't however at the time illegal, not in Massachusetts. It was theft, not perversion; or, it was perversion only in that the author, while acknowledged, was not paid. If some Massachusetts lawyer had both printed and sold the novel and claimed to be the author, that would have been both perversion and plagiarism.

My post here from November 2005, which I named at the time "Meretricious Internet," told how Ivan Illich prescribed learning networks for an over-schooled world in 1970. Likewise in 1970 I offered to run the networks, to become the community's cybernetic librarian, tracking and publishing digital records of volunteered information about public resources for learning – who taught English (or bridge), who wanted to practice English (or to play bridge), and what English speakers (or bridge players) had to say about the teachers (and players). I further offered, via correspondence with the more than one hundred other learning networks burgeoning on all continents around the world in 1971, 1972, to coordinate this public information: establish the data base, maintaining the data base, share the data base with other data bases ... Say someone in Tokyo is planning to visit Manhattan: thinking ahead, they know that they will want a local English teacher upon their arrival, and will also want to meet with other Japanese speakers learning English for practice. Additionally they want to know if any of the teachers or practicers might have a reputation as a rapist. Their Tokyo learning network contacts my New York exchange: available data could be sent to the traveller while still in Tokyo.

Additionally my network recommended expanding learning resources to include all kinds of public information. The same system could be used to list healers, attorneys ... auto mechanics, firemen ...

Illich designed the learning networks in the religious spirit of the great priest and saint he was. I recognized his design as not only the science fiction I valued but the Christian simplicity that I valued more. Illich's networked public could slough off not only the ghastly intrusive coercive school system but also the ghastly intrusive all-but-coercive hegemony of the military-industrial complex. People could free themselves of government while they were freeing themselves of school. We moderns could begin to live for the first time like "Christians": no matter what superstition we did or didn't embrace!

If you didn't want your phone number published, then your phone number would be no business of my Free Learning Exchange. No one in Tokyo would be given your phones number via my digital library. (What the FBI or CIA did with your phone number would not be in my control.) (But: together, we could have starved all such federal agencies by ganging together to refuse to pay taxes!) (We would however have had to pay, voluntarily to pay, the networks – this world didn't come into being not for impossibility but because the group didn't will it so, didn't support it.)

What the group did do was wait decades, government and commerce leaching resources the while, and then offer a perversion of my internet: utterly plagiarized because no credit was given to Jesus or to Ivan Illich or to yours truly, Paul Knatz.