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There is, of course, the thorny question of censorship. With so much material available, there are constant demands to censor the darker corners of the web. Mike Slocombe is the founder of the highly popular alternative underground protest site Urban 75, and he is happy to be considered a 'web anarchist'. His site covers a wide range of issues trying to offer viewpoints that are not normally to be found in the mainstream press, and he is not someone who takes kindly to the idea of censorship. " In reality it's almost unworkable because of the way the internet works. If one company bans a certain subject matter, the person providing the content will just stick it on another server in another country. A lot of people write to me and say, 'What about the children and all the sex out there?' I think it would be a pretty irresponsible parent that just hands a connected computer to a 12 year old. The web reflects human life, warts and all, and there are some awful things in human nature, there are some great things in human nature. The web just reflects that."
Adams likens the idea of trying to censor the internet to trying to censor telephone conversations. At the end of the day, in his view, these are just people talking. And you don't have to listen. He is far more enthusiastic about the potential that an evolving system of global communication is offering, getting excited by what he describes as 'electronic democracy'. "Imagine what will happen as more and more of the little transactions of our lives, our decisions, our businesses, our purchases, our arguments, get conducted in close and immediate contact with each other over the internet. My belief and my hope is that the speed of response of the internet will re-introduce us to that from which our political systems have separated us for so long, the consequences of our own actions."
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