American westward expansion is romanticized in history as the heroic American frontiers man going west to civilize the wilderness. The American Western sometimes brings this story to life, but often the western takes a converse narrative approach, defining civilization as corrupt and romanticizing man’s individual retreat into the wilderness and frontier as heroic. The tension between building up infrastructure and escaping that infrastructure is what we wanted to bring to life in our film. When it comes to the internet this infrastructure can be viewed as censorship. When it comes to ‘civilizing’ the vast expanse of the internet where do Americans stand? Is it heroic to censor or heroic to evade this censorship? Our film creates an environment (a physical and digital space) in which it seems just to censor content and users who are in violent pursuit of an individual. However, our film ultimately shows the perils of too much censorship and surveillance, leading to the restriction of our cowboy’s actions, including taking a photograph to spread awareness. Thus our cowboy concludes that censorship has gone too far and sets out to destroy the censoring of certain topics like “identity” “religion” and “race”. However he ultimately concludes not to destroy the restriction on hate speech, retiring his role as arbiture of the infrastructure of the web, gaining the understanding that freedom is important but that allowing free reign over the internet inherently gives voice to the powerful and silences weaker groups.
