Turkey’s first torrent support website http://www.torrentdestek.com .

I’m in my late thirties, and for the vast majority of people outside science classes at Universities, there was no internet till the late 90s, certainly not in the 70s or 80s. When there were fewer TV channels, you didn’t just watch reruns, you watched what was worthwhile, then spent time outside media till there was something worth watching again. There was no point having an ‘on demand’ attitude, because you had to accept what was brought forth by creative people. Which was sometimes blah, sometimes great, and made for a different sense of community to that which is still in its formation phase with the internet. I found that it made me make demands upon myself, that the surfeit of information and, more often, opinion, distracts from.

I agree with you, that money should be spent educating people well. But this has been said for a very long time, and the amount of money spent on educating people well has always been subject to this sort of debate; no one ever wants to deny opportunity to others, but then providing that opportunity starts to eat into your own funds, limiting your choices and opportunity. These are the balances that, growing older, you have to weigh up. Young people want everything to be free for all, but it is not just bad grace that denies it; having to work for information is also worthwhile and vital to developing strength and quality of mind. Surely those that want to work in a free-to-consumer environment will continue to do so, if they can live that way; they must be content to enjoy their lives that way, and not try to overturn the – probably larger – part of society that has different tastes, that require different organisational structures, that cohere into payment for the exchange of entertainment – because that is what they enjoy.

Experience has taught me that, while it is emotionally preferable to receive a service for free, if I need to take issue with the service provided, it is so much more practicable if it has been paid for. Favours always come with a cost; paying for a service puts that cost into clear terms if there is a dispute, and does encourage a serious attitude to be taken towards the work. The internet is full of people who work hard and voluntarily to push back its boundaries; it has not been in society for much more than 10 or 15 years, so I counsel not expecting this freedom to last. People work hard because they see or feel a personally-fulfilling goal to be at the end of their labour; the balancing of these goals is the aggregation we call society, which has to be efficient, or it dies out, usually in a baroque flurry of cultural activity. Society – humanity – has always through history, not just now, required strong and intelligent members to allow it to thrive, however the free dissemination of information is not guaranteed to produce them, it can just as easily produce copy-cats, hollow apers of the qualities necessary for society to survive. This is a part of the caution that older people bring to the argument of spending our resources on universal free-access to information. I know that there a lot of people in the third world who would prefer that the money spent on building this network, be spent on feeding them, if we are to claim to be climbing to the highest moral point. We have had it very well up here in Northern Europe, and have built a hell of an infrastructure, but that has not been achieved by a belief in universal freedom, but by a balance of conflicting urges that has kept us all pushing.

Nonetheless, I agree that we need to create a common media marketplace akin to a universal library service. Ironically, it is free access to the internet, that is ruining libraries here in England, as they are converted to places more akin to play areas, so as not to frighten away those who can’t deal with silence, destroying the silence that others go there to find, so that media can be consumed, reflected on, and built on in ways other than immediate social-networking. The chatterers in libraries have not built our society, they have only enjoyed it, and so their opinions are not as urgent as they think they are, when we talk about how the future should be planned. Those who want free distribution of art should distribute their art for free; if they want and need money for it, they should work to obtain that money. Their art will then reflect the reality of living, which is that nothing real comes for free – only dole comes for free, and only in the last 100 years. Money should be spent on providing a bedrock of hospitals and security for those who live in a society, then all are free to pursue their own dreams, no just follow artists’ dreams. Artists have to struggle, too, unless they can find a way not to, with an ingenuity that comes through the art-form and impresses the viewer; if their dreams need charity donated for them to come into being, then they are not strong enough for them to be a real engagement with what it means to be alive, and are just fluff, no matter how earnest. Having everything you want when you want it is great, but art is most vital when it provides hope that the problems of life are surmountable, and helps that process; grant-funded artists just adds to the volume of content , not its quality.

You should treat her like any other person in the parliament. Not that it really matters, she is in now. I doubt any of you have the power to remove her anyways. ;)