Column - Decentralized structures create and protect freedom

Oh, what a difference a week makes. Just more than a week ago, college students have literally gone from the darkest of times – a Wikipedia blackout – to basking in the light of victory – the defeat of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in Congress.

But, before we move on from this temporary victory and go back to our usual business online of memes and sharing party pictures, we need to appreciate how truly powerful the Internet's impact is in our daily lives and why.

Like an immune system responding to a foreign agent in the body, the Internet defended itself well from the onslaught of SOPA/PIPA. While we all use the Internet to varying degrees, the hard-core users were able to creatively use the system itself to raise awareness to lighter users and those not privy to the day-to-day machinations of our Congress. From Facebook and Twitter, to even Tumblr and Wikipedia, word of danger spread among users like meerkats popping up and squeaking on the savanna.

The months-long squeaks of danger came to a thunderous roar on Jan. 18 when the "blackout" protests began. No longer was this just a pet issue for some, but became common knowledge for anyone using the Internet that day as such mainstays of the system – Google and Wikipedia – protested with their own methods. Google simply blacked out their famous image on their Web page, and informed users why, but still let users operate their search engine.

Wikipedia, on the other hand, gave users a taste of what the Internet would be like if SOPA/PIPA passed – they completely disabled their site and left up a black screen that allowed users to contact their representatives in Congress to vote against SOPA/PIPA.

It is situations like these that make the Internet great. So often lost in the praise of it being a communication medium that connects the world at the click of a button, is the equally important – if not more important – manner in which these connections happen in the first place.

The radically decentralized nature of the Internet, in the way it communicates among users and operates as a system itself, is what makes it so powerful and unique.

This anarchic system of computers and servers is so strong through its seemingly weak structure, that communication and behavior within the system became a reflection of it.

Since its explosion of popularity in the 1990s, the Internet has enabled people of so many varying niches of lifestyles, tastes, ideas and interests to find one another online. All this coordination and building of websites and forums dedicated to these niches has all gone along essentially uncoordinated.

And then much like the differing methods of protest from Google and Wikipedia, when differences arise, they are allowed to coexist.

Mandated uniformity goes not only against the grain of how Internet culture operates, but is not even necessary for it function as a system.

As soon as a discrepancy arises within any community, large or small, a new community develops to accommodate it. The antagonism between groups and communities can still exist online. They are, after all, groups created by humans who are flawed and prone to conflict, but none of it endangers the system as a whole from functioning.

Not only can the Internet survive from fallouts of communities, it can even thrive with disparate groups unifying around a central issue.

From the current SOPA/PIPA reaction to the presidential campaign of Congressman Ron Paul, the Internet is at the top of its abilities when a myriad of different groups can coalesce around a central, unifying theme that still allows for differences.

Add in the traditional benefit of the Internet – worldwide communication at the click of a button – and you have all the ingredients for positive, long-lasting changes to our "offline" world of politics and society.

Fittingly enough, roughly a year ago the Internet helped bring about positive change in just this manner, when people from all backgrounds united in rebellion against the tyrannical political system in Egypt.

We have now seemingly honored this tradition in our own country by using the Internet to fend off a tyrannical system from being implemented in the first place. This is the lesson the Internet has for our generation, here and around the world.

In defeating SOPA/PIPA, the Internet has not only taught us how to defeat future onslaughts on its freedom, but on our own as well.

Only if we keep each other informed, agreeing on broad fundamentals as a group – but agreeing to disagree when differences arise – and operating as a decentralized array of activists with no over-arching leader or group structure, can we hope to attain universal freedom in our own lifetime.