‘Free the Network’ Trailer

February 29, 2012, 1:00pm

Free the Network is now live. Watch the full thing here.

If it’s ever all said and done, Occupy Wall Street will go down as the first fully Internet-fueled social movement in the United States. 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 peek 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.