It comes as a great concern to this #CultOfMarkPesce devotee that others on Twitter are attempting to commit heresy by starting a #CultOfNickHodge.

There is only One True Cult, One True Way to Internet Enlightenment.

A mere droid of the Borg can not, nor ever can be, a Cult Leader.

On 16 February 2006, Australian public broadcaster SBS current affairs program DATELINE telecast a segment featuring 60 new photos of the torture inflicted on prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

These photos were secured by court order, but the photos had not, at that time, been shown in the media anywhere in the United States.

Our Mark immediately saw the need for access to both Web-downloadable versions and BitTorrent file-sharing network versions of the broadcast. He sprang into action and made both the images and the show itself available on his VRML website.

His initiative was responsible for the dissemination of this information into the US.

Mark Pesce, our noted leader and predictor of all things digital shows his flexibility.

In a recently posted video of a 2007 lecture, Mark used the work Networking to describe the our internet future. A future, I might add, that will come to fruition as he predicts.

Like other soothsayers such as Nostradamus, the exact nomenclature of future objects and technologies will change: and Mark knows this. In fact, I believe that Mark is inventing these terms for our emerging digital culture.

From 2007: Networking

From 2008: Hyperconnectivity

From 2009: Sharing

In early 2008, Our Mark wrote:

Child pornography rings are highly secure, highly secretive, and almost entirely invisible. No child pornographer has been detected or caught through filtered network traffic. These rings are cracked because some law enforcement agency has broken into the human network of individuals who trade in these images. Filtering has not, nor will ever stop the distribution of any child pornography. Hence, Australia’s net filter will not do anything to stop or even slow down child pornography. It’s an emotional argument that has zero practical value.

In late 208, Our Mark wrote:

Which means that viewing a clip of The Simpsons on YouTube will soon be as illegal as watching it on television. In particular, videos showing the various times Homer has strangled Bart – which exist – would be very illegal, the equivalent of the most severe child abuse materials. And God help you if you should flip a link of that video to one of your friends. That’d be “distributing” child-abuse materials, because, where we are now, distribution has expanded to include link-sharing.

….

The age of gatekeepers is over. There are no gatekeepers anywhere. There is no way to keep someone from downloading the horrific child abuse that is The Simpsons. There’s no way to keep them from telling others about it. There’s no way to keep them from sharing it. Yet we’re hamstrung by legal processes and a Government which are completely desynchronised from the world at large.

In his own inimitable style, Our Mark was pointing out how both the Judiciary and the Executive branches of Australian government were struggling with the basic concepts behind the internet, and how this would affect ordinary users of the intenet. Before this subject hit the mainstream, before a Television show on our public broadcaster was hijacked over the matter. Truly a man ahead of his time.