Rep Jim Sensenbrenner (R- WI 5th) responded to a constituent’s question about privacy and internet usage by saying ‘no one has to use the internet’. But doesn’t that really simply tell us how little he himself uses it?
Born in 1943, the internet was not a factor in his life for the first sixty years. The twitter account quoted above was created in 2012 - when the man was almost 70. It's not his twitter account; in fact, the twitter account @JimSensenbrenner isn't his, and neither is @RpSensenbrenner. (They've both been around since 2011, the year before his 'press' twitter account got going). He's a man who's never bothered to get involved with the internet. He's ignoring it competely, going about his life - and his career in Congress - as if it weren't there.
Suppose, when the telephone was first becoming common, phone providers listened in on yor conversations, and then sent door-to-door salesmen to your home based on what you talked about? Someone who was sixty when phones first began to appear in everyone’s homes might not care about that, either. “No one has to use a phone” they might say, because they didn’t grow up with one; and they would not be able to understand the ways in which they would change the world.
Let’s set aside the question of what, in fact, people might actually have to do online these days.
Right now, we are engaged in a massive cultural, political, and industrial revolution because of the internet. It’s the force driving massive democratization of cuture in every aspect of life. Sensebrenner’s position is based on ignorance; he is, simply, not competent to assess the internet’s importance or impact – he didn’t grow up with it, doesn’t use it, and he doesn’t see or understand its significance. It’s not all his fault; he’s a product of his time and circumstance. But he, and others like him, really need to get out of the way.
The difference in cognizance of what’s happening in the world has never been starker. You have whole swathes of people in the country who don’t understand what the internet represents. Republicans and Democrats, they are not savvy about using it. It is age-correlated, but it is not determined by age. This same ignorance led establishment Democrats to rally around the second least popular candidate in history – who managed to lose to the least popular candidate in history. Those of us who make use of the abundance of information that the web provides, and who have done so enough to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff – that is, who aren’t immediately taken in by every extreme headline from every sketchy website – saw the problem a mile away. The establishment of both parties, by definition older and more conservative (and hence less likely to be internet users), can’t; and most of them never will.
Sensenbrenner’s been in Congress since 1979, and has won re-election handily ever since. I know no one of any party who agrees with the idea that internet providers should be able to sell our information to advertisers. My Trump-voting mom thinks it’s a terrible idea. If there was ever an issue that illustrates how out of touch a candidate is, with constituents or reality, this is it; and there would be no more powerful signal sent to the establishment in Washington than unseating this guy.
I’m not saying that he’s a bad man; he’s just incompetent, and needs to go.
Oh, and just to give his stance on privacy a little context: he's the guy who introduced the Patriot act to the House of Representatives.