I'm guessing that the phrase "stick it to the man" originated in
the USA, some expression of how within the ideal world of
capitalist freedom individuals still feel their lives formed to the
benefit of others. It escapes any scary proposals of alterative
social systems or conclusions about human morality, by focusing
purely on the individual. It's about finding and exploiting an
opportunity to avoid a convention that benefits some powerful
entity at your own expense.
By putting content on Gopher instead of the web, avoiding
personalised sites like Facebook and hiding it outside the sweep of
Google's content-fed crawlers, I am "sticking it to the man" in my
own nerdy way. Equally you are too by reading this. We choose this
path because we have the knowledge to pursue it, akin to how those
mechanically skilled might maintain their own vehicle, the
green-thumbed might grow their own food, and the old ladies might
knit their own clothing.
However the breadth of skills that apply to the modern life is
really beyond the grasp of the individual. I've done my best to
figure out how to maintain a car, armed with a Haynes manual, vague
help from the internet, and lots of guesswork. But to do so I have
bought tools that I couldn't possibly have fabricated myself, and
with the objective of replacing parts that I would have even less
of a start on replicating from scratch. I cut out one man, only to
meet the many men who stood behind him.
Here with Gopher it's no different. Sure I've dodged the big
dot-com giants risen to unrivaled greatness on the back of what
might be the defining techbology of our century. But I still have
to pay someone to get this content online, and so do you in order
to view it, your ISP. While other companies might not be able to
make money from advertising to you as you try to find or view my
content, one is charging you simply to access it. By contributing
to the internet, I am creating more content for ISPs to monetise,
providing for free the merchandise that they sell.
Now it's not impossible to get past the need for an ISP. There are
actually a lot of private networks around major cities that use
wireless communications to share network services between members.
In theory you could even expand this concept as far as raising
funds for not-for-profit communication satellites. But still you'll
be buying the equipment to build your network with - in fact making
your own silicon chips to construct completely DIY wireless
networking hardware would probably be as much of a task as building
your own rocket to launch one of those satellites into orbit.
There's another problem with "sticking it to the man" because when
we are best at it, it's probably because we're using skills gained
for our own employment. By necessity these are the skills that we
best extend and refine, and therefore bring them to a level that
can practically compete with "the man" while still having time and
energy to maintain a normal existance within society.
But this likely means that we are in fact contributing to the very
industry that overall supports "the man". Even if not making money
for him, we understand the world that he has created, overall we
_are_ those who created it, and in fact we set out to create it
just for our own individual benefit.
