If it’s ever all said and done, Occupy Wall Street will go down as the first fully Internet-fueled social movement in the U.S. Occupy’s initial success, of course, was in spreading a virtual meme over corporeal reality. But now that the remaining few long-standing Occupy sites have been cleared, that the zombie cousins of toxic digital piracy bills – SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and others – still roam the corridors of power, and that New York City activists will be holding mass anti-corporatist demonstrations throughout the day today, it’s as if the battle for economic justice and ownership of the Internet has only just begun.
In that spirit, here’s a teaser peak at our latest feature documentary, Free the Network, which looks at how DIY hack-tech is changing the discourse of modern day protests. Our story follows the trials of a pair of college dropouts who head up the Free Network Foundation, a peer-to-peer communications initiative seeking to liberate the global Internet from corporate clutches by building their own decentralized, cooperatively owned, free network, one wifi hotspot at a time.
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Watch the trailer at Motherboard.
