I use, and not surf, as "surfing the internet" should be dropped out of the internet experience lexicon. It is nothing but the outdated legacy of web 1.0, when the non-technical internet user role was passive, at the receiving end. Now things are different. The current non-technical internet users are potentially gods. They build and shape the internet, vindicating the Idealists' conception of our world as merely a one of ideas a, in which the internet is nothing but an extension of our thinking capabilities and realities.
At the core of internet users experience has always been the constant venturing into unknown, to them, sometimes prohibited, worlds and ideas, circumventing obstinate societal structures, that are erected for no other reasons than maintaining their own existence, and the interests of those who find their interests protected by those structures. That experience has embedded into it the potential of maturing beyond the mere circumventing of such mental chains into pressuring forces that remold, reshape, and break them in a reality where the internet itself is inseparable to our existence as societies.
More than once I caught myself thinking change in terms of demand. "We should ask for teaching hardcore evolution and not the laissez faire version they teach at our schools if they ever teach it", this is what I once wrote, reflecting how immature my experience of this online world has been thus far. A one in which I am only voicing and expressing my opinions, not realizing the potential capability that such a tool can endow me with in striking back firmly at the physical world, the potential of a promising attempt at taking things into my own hands as a user.
The well structured, experienced, and sophisticated apparatus of censorship that had been screwing with our kids brains at schools for so long now can be easily toppled with some content that goes viral, which might be, the virality that is, a matter of a year long ad campaign costing no more than one JD per day. A swift strike coming out of no pre-calculated where toward such a structure of censorship, no matter how invulnerable it may seem, can toss it into a final state of chaos from which it may never recover. Added to this is the fact that these keystones of despotism are interdependent on each others, effecting a tossing, ipso facto, of the whole status quo into one last performance before its cessation.
But this potential might be the subject of a surgical removal that is being silently and subtly carried out right now, and it won't be a surprise if the newer generation of internet infrastructure, once laid out, enable some sort of centrality that grants very few select political agencies, or commercial companies acting on behalf of those political agencies, full control over the internet, comparable, in some aspects, to that which governments maintain in the physical realm. The newer generations of search engines are already limiting your experience online without telling you that they do so (read here).
For the sake of fairness, our experience on the none user-optimized engines used to be limited by our very personal habits, and by technical matters that don't pertain to the content mapped to, but that was as far as it went; it was not a conscious limit, or a one that served conscious sinister goals, so to speak. Even if there was no sinister plots lurking beneath factoring your geographical location into your search results, which is more worrying in the case of searching for commentary on international events than for brands or commercial services, it is highly unethical, according to most of the ethical notions out there, to do such a thing without explaining it clearly enough to users, whom the overwhelming majority's conception of the internet is too primitive to fully distinguish between google and the internet.
That is, in my opinion, where anarchism finds a new lease of life. There, the anarchist vision of a world where power is distributed and never accentuated embodies itself, rightly, in the form of the not so coincidentally called distributed services (e.g. distributed search engines and social media networks, Diaspora being an example on the latter). And this is why it is a necessity that any effort seeking spreading an awareness of the internet as a tool for change should integrate the concept and importance of distributed internet services into its curriculum.
As a closing remark, I need to state that I am not fully against non-technical search engine optimization. I advocate some sort of randomness in the search outcomes of engines for the different users regardless of any personal or geographical considerations. This may help in making the internet experience unique for each and every user, instead of presenting knowledge through search engines as too rigid and parochial.
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