#IAmSpartacus – Why the law can't keep up with technology

Mashable has an article about the Spartacus effect as I like to call it.

The South Yorkshire man who was recently convicted for joking about bombing an airport on Twitter is now just one of many who have done the exact same thing.

Paul Chambers’s original tweet, “Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” was meant as a joke, but Judge Jacqueline Davis saw things differently. She thought the tweet was “menacing in its content,” dismissing Chambers’s appeal to the original sentence, a £1,000 fine.

Furthermore, Chambers has been ordered to pay an additional £2,000 to cover the legal bills, and lost his job as a financial manager as a consequence of his arrest.

Now, thousands of Twitter users are expressing support for Chambers, repeating his tweet together with a hashtag #IAmSpartacus, a reference to the film Spartacus, in which fellow gladiators express solidarity with Spartacus by uttering the phrase, “I am Spartacus.”

The hashtag is now a global trending topic on Twitter, and Chambers’s tweet has been repeated by thousands of users.

FIGJAM should take careful note of this as he seeks to try to control the internet. The Spartacus effect and mobilised, serious users of technology make almost any attempt to control the internet meaningless and ultimately pointless, other than for trying to raise the profile of the fool proposing it.

The law never has kept up with technology and never will. the internet was designed for freedom and routing around blockages, the justice system is just a network blockage and users are routing around.

FIGJAM runs the same risk of becoming a network blockage, one that will be flushed out of the system electorally if he keeps meddling where he knows nothing. He would be best to go back to being a third rate conveyancing lawyer in a small provincial town.