MANILA, Philippines — Did you know… that before Sir Isaac Newton invented gravity in the 17th century, everything had to be nailed down? …that Lance Armstrong was the first man on the moon? …that pasta lovers can plant spaghetti trees to reduce their carbonara footprint? And most importantly of all…that Yoda is Luke’s father? Or so say Twitter users all over the world using the hashtag #FactsWithoutWikipedia.

This was in response to the string of online protests last week against US Congress’ move to pass the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)and its lesser-known counterpart, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA).

Wikipedia and other websites had completely shut down for 24 hours to give the world a taste of what it would be like “without a free internet”—the world, they claimed, that SOPA/PIPA would create. Google had a matter-of-fact one-line objection on their homepage, and launched an online petition against the legislation.

The hashtag #StopSOPA was also a big thing on Twitter, even with foreign users like ourselves who technically aren’t under the jurisdiction of the US Congress—which shows just how much we enjoy getting on the bandwagon, or just how American-dominated the internet really is, or both.

The bill aims to protect copyright holders from piracy, prohibiting websites from listing sources with pirated content. But the provisions are feared to be too broad—YouTube couldn’t possibly pre-screen every single second of video that gets uploaded to the site, Google would have to rewire the whole search engine system so as not to display borrowed content. And if these drastic moves don’t work, with that law in place, it is feared that copyright holders might end up going after YouTube, Google and other content-mediating sites—which, of course, would herald the debacle of the internet as we know it.

The protests have achieved the desired effect. Many American legislators have issued statements withdrawing their support for the bill. Essentially, or so they say, the bill has been thrown out, and they’re gonna have to find another way to stop online piracy—if, that is, it can be stopped at all. Things are quiet on the home front for now.

But I can’t help but wonder if an internet-less eventuality is really all that bad, or if it’s merely part of contemporary first-world paraparanoia, and if the SOPA/PIPA legislations are not attempts to control and regulate this massive tool we don’t yet fully understand.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the internet. I use it almost every day of my life. I get to see some of my best-loved movies through it. Because of it, I don’t have to fax or hand-deliver much of the written output that I generate for work. It is still the one great revolution of our generation—changing the face of news reporting, trials by publicity, and the way we meet people and maintain friendships. But I’m old enough to remember a time when homes didn’t have computers in them, and I’m old enough to know that just because something has been revolutionized does not mean it won’t work any other way—a lot like can openers, really, making it much easier to open corned beef cans. But just because you don’t have a can opener doesn’t mean you can’t make do with a knife.

In the same way, before online gaming, there were those of us who actually spent playtime in the flesh with the neighbor’s kids, sharing real or makeshift toys. And even these days, when writing a research paper for University, it is still safer to cite a published and peer-reviewed source than to rip off some Nietzsche commentary from Sparknotes.I think the internet is immensely useful—but that it is precisely that: for us to utilize, not for us to be enslaved to. The thing about the internet is that we can live without it. Its absence cannot paralyze us. Sure it makes the world a much easier place to live in—but who’s to say that what is easier is necessarily better?