Last year, I wrote about New Year’s Eve of 1983.

Since then, things have gone horribly fast in the wrong direction:

Authorities have been seizing domain names on mere accusations.

Powerful interests are demanding censorship of inconvenient information.

Blanket and secret censorship is being introduced as an uncontroversial measure in Western democracies.

Media is threatened with fines if they publish something unpatriotic (Hungary).

People are threatened into paying private fines.

Financial corporations decided that they get to say who starves and who gets money (WikiLeaks, PayPal, Visa, Mastercard).

Overall, the Pirate Party’s failure in the general elections of 2010 was a blank check to the administration to screw the entire net generation over backwards in several rotations with regressive and repressive laws.

But there are also many promising developments:

In the light of domain seizures, initiatives have been taken on a distributed DNS that will be resilient to any court order.

Cryptography is becoming easier and more available to the masses.

Dictatorships and corrupt authorities are falling and being exposed at levels not before seen.

Discussions on a resilient, opaque and cryptographic replacement of the entire banking system are intensifying.

I’d like to end with a quote from @intensifier:

2010 was the year when we proved that internet is powerful. 2011 is the year we make the revolution.

Happy new 1984, everyone. With authorities and legislators failing, the fate of the open society is now in our hands.