“It happened around the time hats came back into style…”
Iniquity opens in a speculative future Auckland, New Zealand. The story hypothesises a not-so-distant time in which bloggers and citizen journalists are prosecuted by a repressive government for “media crimes”, the internet is outlawed and the news is censored to remove any references that threaten to harm the interests of the state, cause panic or disturb social peace.
The bullet-point party blames the public’s “internet addiction” for the death of print media and the demise of the financial institutions, and doesn’t hesitate to violently punish citizens who persists in going online.
The citizens fight back by populating secret dens where they can access a mirror image of the internet — a nostalgic Wayback Machine of restored information woven by the users of the dens and their custodians. In one such den the action takes place.
In the real world and happening right now, the enemies of the internet are legion: the genesis of Iniquity was a short news piece in the Guardian Weekly in August 2010 about the prospect of internet censorship in Venezuela, President Hugo Chávez’s attempts to “regulate the internet” and to clamp down on “media crimes”.
Since then, internet censorship and suppression of social media during the revolution in Egypt, the revolt in Libya and the violent protests in Bahrain foretell similar kinds of repression to those Chris Bell imagines in his story.
Reporters Without Borders says in its 12 March 2011 Internet Enemies report: “Although the internet is certainly used by dissidents, it is also used by the authorities to relay regime propaganda and enforce a police state.”
The bleak future portrayed in Iniquity may already be at hand: “Currently, one out of every three internet users is unable to access a free internet,” says Reporters Without Borders. “Net censorship is becoming the norm.”
The underlying message in Iniquity is that unless we continue to treat it as a resource for the future, the free internet may soon be but a memory.
