The United States Already Comes with a Terms of Service. You Just Won’t Fix It.

Writing a new terms of service for the United States would be a classic example of American thinking, the wrong solution to the wrong problem. The United States already has the perfect terms of service, an amendable constitution. Many of my peers may argue that the constitution is an outdated document, doesn't provide the protections they want, and specifically isn't suited for the increasingly digital world in which we live, and they'd be right. But because it is amendable through a democratic process, all of that can change. It hasn't changed, however, and given all the polarization and lack of political participation that exists in this country today I highly doubt I will see another amendment ratified in my lifetime, the last of which being ratified in 1992, 203 years after it was first proposed in 1789.

So if it’s so difficult to pass an amendment to the constitution, why not just write up a new document? Because that response is ignorant of the problems that keep our constitution from adapting to the times, an ignorance that is becoming increasingly typical of my generation’s libertarian hacker set. This is a group that believed Occupy Wall Street was a viable movement, seems to believe that the government shouldn't be conducting any amount of intelligence gathering or espionage, and are extremely vocal about just how upset they are with the current state of the United States. And what has my generation decided to do about it? Yell and scream from behind a keyboard and an LCD screen. Ask anything more than sign a Change.org petition or up vote a new set of creative memes and you’re unlikely to see our nation’s youth pull themselves away from Minecraft or an eight hour binge session of Breaking Bad long enough for anything to actually be done about all these issues they have with this country.

Who can really blame us? I am as uncomfortable with the way PRISM or National Security Letters work as the next guy, but the comfort of a 50 inch plasma screen that can stream on demand just about anything my heart desires goes a long way to pushing any of those concerns to the back of my mind. A new terms of service isn't going to change anything. We need to change. We need to decide that these problems are worth going to the street about and demanding things be done, worth giving up our careers and suspending our educations until we accomplish our goals. Or we can complain about it on reddit while we wait for Grand Theft Auto 5, and just hope that one day soon it doesn’t come to a point where things are so bad that it is too late. Until any of that happens, no matter what you think you’re doing about it, including writing a new terms of service, you're just making more noise.

We have to change ourselves before we can change or system, and especially before we start to create something new.