This idea is appealing to Galloway who would defend against critics of the system who cite issues of privacy and notions of Big Brother. These same arguments come up against the very nature of networks and the internet, and Galloway shuts the protest down from the get-go: the co-dependency of each user and each machine on a network is not a vulnerability that can be exploited or avoided, but is rather a necessary, fundamental aspect of the entire system. By logging in and accessing information we are knowingly or not volunteering information in our ‘possession’ and about ourselves. It is an opt-in system in which everyone clicks yes on the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Agreements that the majority of people probably never bother to read. The result is “a balanced state of a universal ‘participatory panopticon’ in which there is an equiveillance, or equilibrium of monitoring and control structures between parties.”
So are people who uphold strict firewalls stingy? Are they ruining the internet? How about people who run wireless networks but are careful enough to not allow leechers. What about people on p2p networks or torrent clients who set their upload bandwidth to zero? Some (in fact, most good) torrent clients have introduced a necessary ratio requirement, in which one must allow other users to upload as much data as one has downloaded. On less strict p2p networks, other users can notice that someone is not willing to share and cancel their downloads (or make them tortuously slow.) Sounds like equiveillance to me. (Does this make the internet a democracy? Anarchy? I have no idea.)
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