The futility of digital censorship: a fictional look at governments' desperate efforts to restrict the flow of information on the Internet.

• Author: Naam, Ramez
• Position: Excerpt

The following is an excerpt from Ramez Naam's novel Nexus, dramatizing the futility of government attempts to stop the spread of a new drug once the knowledge of how to make it gets on the Internet. The drug in question allows human beings to link their minds together.

THE BATTLE OVER distribution of the Nexus 5 files lasted just under 31 hours. It began at 2:21 p.m. EST on Sunday, April 29. An anonymous slate connected to an ASIACOM Net access satellite began uploading large compressed packages to file-sharing services around the world, posting them to bulletin boards, distributing links to prominent news sites and scientific paper exchanges worldwide. Automated censor daemons in the United States detected the new files and noted their linkage to terms on the daemons' watch-lists and the speed with which the files were spreading.

They alerted their human operators and instituted temporary blocks of the files at the North American Electronic Shield firewall. Fifteen miles south of Baltimore, at Fort George G. Meade Army Base, National Security Agency on-call supervisors started seeing alerts from their daemons. Someone was distributing files that claimed to show how to synthesize Nexus 3 and how to convert that into Nexus 5. Daemons were instructed to disrupt transfer of the files worldwide. A supervisor flagged the event and forwarded it to the International Clearing House on Global Technological Threats.

Systems in Europe, China, Russia, Japan, India, and 80 other nations received bulletins instantly. Many of them were already aware of the outbreak and had initiated their own measures. Across two-thirds of the Internet nodes on the planet, propagation of the files halted. Supervisors congratulated themselves. Fast action and international cooperation had saved humanity from a posthuman threat once again.

At 3:38 p.m. EST, a teenager in Portland, Oregon--who'd downloaded the files before the interdiction-repackaged and reposted them to a peer-to-peer sharing site with a new name, "Badass Neuro Shit You Should Check Out from Axon and Synapse." The name referred to the credited authors of the neural software contained in several of the files. Other users of the peer-sharing service began downloading it, distributing the files to their computers, which in turn offered it up to others.

At 4:08 p.m. EST, the files were cross-posted to a San Francisco music fanlist with the comment "Is this the same as DJ Axon? Is this really how you make...