I just saw this piece from Fortune reporting that Lawrence Lessig is predicting a catastrophic online event within the next decade that will prompt the US government to unveil an already-written bill similar to the PATRIOT Act which will grant the Fed additional powers in Internet surveilance and investigation. Evidently, Lessig got this information from a counterterrorism expert:

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"Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change."
                                        -- Economist Milton Friedman

Here is a trailer for a film by Alfonso Cuaron and Naomi Klein called The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

This trailer is quite powerful rhetorically, visually, and emotionally. The authors argue that through disasters, both natural and man-made, the immediate reciprocal "shock" caused by the disaster has the power to reduce us collectively into a child-like state making us open to suggestion and manipulation, and more likely to comply with leaders claiming to protect us.

When products and markets drive every aspect of our lives, we are in deep trouble as a society. The film suggests that through the adoption of Milton Friedman's economic theory of free market capitalism, we, as a society, are reduced to child-like states of helplessness in the aftermath of natural disasters and wars. In the wake of our collective helplessness and psychological stress, laws are passed to enable and extend corporate interests as opposed to the best interests of the people.

Luckily, there seems to be a glimmer of hope at the end of this film. And that glimmer rests in our ability to talk to one another, to communicate, to organize, to publish and share our often under-represented points of view. As Klein argues, shock is only a temporary state. And the best way to resist shock is "to know what is happening to you and why."

The free market is not about freedom and democracy; it's about the economically powerful maintaining control of their power. This is why noted personalities like Tim Berners-Lee (net neutrality) and Larry Lessig (digital rights advocacy) have clearly been arguing much more vociferously as of late. And with good reason. The softer we become to the free market's crusade, the more likely we are to have our rights as individuals and as a society stripped away.

So what can you do? How have you "armed" yourself? I'd be curious to know.