Last week, we won. The Internet, long seen as a mostly harmless collection of kitten aficionados and porn fiends, fought epic battle of self preservation against a substantially better organized enemy, one with much greater experience of that field of battle. But much like Aaron Burr against Alexander Hamilton, crazy random happenstance came into play at the right moment, and the massive dose of overkill didn’t hurt – it was just what the good doctor ordered. Our foe went back to Hollywood, tail between feet, and even admitted in an interview thereafter, in minced words, that they had effectively not bribed politicians sufficiently. It was great. You should’ve been there.
But this silver lining also has an associated cloud, and its shaped like a mushroom. Looking over the forlorn battlefield our only martyr lies rotting: MegaUpload, a vehemently illegal cast member, gutted at the last minute by authorities created to combat corruption and protect civil liberties (seriously). Too bad. So be it.
In the meantime, we’re celebrating. And yet we shouldn’t, because we just made one of the most grievous errors imaginable. On the 18th of January, many netizens protested in various ways. Reddit shut down for a while, Google posted a censorship warning. Khan Academy and TED pulled their weight honorably. Wikipedia went dark for an entire day. A full spin of the globe. Serious measures.
Put into context, this was our trump card, our nuclear deterrent. We just escalated the arms race plenty by putting thermonuclear computational equivalence into play against what amounts to a well funded mafia of global interests. We could’ve been more subtle.
I was one of those who supported Wikipedia’s blackout. After the fact I see that it was wrong, because what we did there was provide Dodd and his cronies (which he needs since he’s not allowed to lobby directly until 2013) with a value estimation of what evil censorship laws such as SOPA and PIPA not passing is worth to us. One day a year. That’s 1/365.25th of the year, in case you’re wondering. That’s about 1/365.25th of our total time currency. Copyright is weaponised time.
What should be understood as generational warfare, where the Internet generation demands the same liberties for creativity as was granted to our great-grandparents, just got reduced to a game where our enemy, a well funded mafia with a fantastically powerful government sponsored protection racket, knows our caliber.
What happens next? Dodd and pals start working on SOPA 2.0 and PIPA 2.0 and DMCA 2.0 and ACTA 2.0 and all the other two-point-ohs, trying to figure out how to sneak it past us, but now they know our currency. How much more powerful do they have to make it for us to cower in fear? Next time, will we need to black out for two days, or three? Thirty, perhaps? Where does it stop?
In the grand scheme of things, SOPA and PIPA are little other than temporary annoyances, like mosquitoes – definitely worth squatting, but not really worth the effort of pulling out your Glock or your launch keys. And while nobody has ever taken down an international mafia with bug spray, that just shows that our methods aren’t toxic enough.
We committed overkill. We won, but too heavily. Now the ground we tread on is radioactive and may itself decay upon further incursions into our realm. What can we do?
I’m not much of a cyberlibertarian, but I have a soft spot for them. They had a few things right, even if suffering from frontier blindness: the overarching belief of those at the frontier of human development is always that they are untouchable. History creeps up on them in their sleep. John Perry Barlow was unequivocal in his righteous demand for sovereignty and independence for Cyberspace, he foresaw that nation states were inherently incapable of existing in a post-territorial communications space. And yet somehow, due to a splendid mix of cronyism, corruption, greed and stealth, we’ve found ourselves in the situation that national interests have strong armed the debate on a field of physical infrastructure and border-theoretical governance.
The Internet is no longer free from incursion from nation states, so anything that can be understood through the delineation of national borders, encapsulated in national interests, or affected through national political processes can affect the Internet directly. Being on the defensive is not going to be a winning strategy. Money just got tight: there’s only so much blackouting we can survive.
So let’s go on the offensive. Instead of having traditional politics interfere with the Internet, it’s time for the Internet to interfere with traditional politics. The various Pirate Parties have moved us part of the way towards establishing a theory of networked information politics, but it’s nowhere near complete. There are a lot of deep fundamental questions that still need to be asked, and a lot of it’s going to require some deep philosophical navel gazing. But I think we can do it.
Not really because I have a problem with the copyright mafia, even though I do. Much more because I’ve been watching meatspace politicians and their bankrupt ideologies take humanity out for too many rodeos. They’ve long since outstayed their welcome, and they must be ousted. Networked politics, information politics, is the way to fix things.
Who else is in favor of aiming our cannons at bigger targets, and quitting with the grapeshot?
#1 by Sassinak on January 23, 2012 - 00:57
When Anonymous responded by DDOJ the DOJ, I freaked out a little. It felt like 9-11 all over the world, at least ideologically.
Then I thought, hitting govn’t services, service to The People, is very close to shooting ourselves in the foot.
Who do we want to punish, exactly ? The Filthy Rich, they are the one pushing govn’ts around. And what industries do these Filthy Rich control ?
- oil
- arms
- sugar
- entertainement, etc….
THEY get rich mainly through abuse of power, disdain of human rights: slavery.
Now Anonymous shoots off saying they are the better man. They have more (virtual) power. They are WITH THE PEOPLE.
I SAY PROVE IT AND “BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE” (Gandhi)
Shut down the sites that sustain real human misery and slavery. Show us you care. Show them you really are more powerful than govn’t.
SHUT DOWN THE PORN SITES. SHUT DOWN THE WEAPONS MANUFACTURERS’ SITES.
Oh, yes you can. ONLY YOU CAN DO IT.
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#2 by Andrew D. Todd on January 24, 2012 - 18:45
The Internet Blackout day was like a fire alarm.
The basic purpose of a fire alarm is to wake people up in the middle of the night, before they are painlessly asphyxiated by smoke. The siren has to be very loud for that purpose. Painfully loud. Of course, a sophisticated fire alarm will also call the fire department, and report a fire at a particular address, and once the firemen arrived, a control panel just outside the front door will allow them to see at a glance which sensors have been triggered.
Very well, in the same way, we proceed from a general alarm to specific information. Once the Demand Progress organization has someone on an e-mail list, and has gotten their street address for good measure, they can send out immensely specific alerts, eg.: “The primary date in your state is such-and-such, your polling place is such-and-such school, and if you ask for the primary ballot of such-and-such a party, you will have the chance to vote out such-and-such an incumbent, who has carried water for the MPAA/RIAA.” Given an offer of such specific notices, and sufficient money, raised over the internet, an insurgent primary candidate can be found, a complete political amateur it necessary.
#3 by Smári McCarthy on January 24, 2012 - 19:25
That’s a very good point, and great way of seeing it. I still think that we could have been more subtle, but the real point is that we’ve gotten to the point where this fight isn’t going to be subtle any longer, so now we need to turn this around, make it into an offensive. I’m going to be more offensive (in various ways) in coming posts..
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#4 by Neil Kandalgaonkar on February 10, 2012 - 06:58
Hi there. For what it’s worth, I am one of the coders who made the Wikipedia blackout happen. The exact form of the protest was dictated by the community, but I helped make it a reality.
I had misgivings about the blackout myself. At the time, I said that it’s the sort of gun you can’t fire twice. Given that SOPA backers were on the run by January 18 already, it might have been overkill. And I agree with your overall thesis that it is now necessary for “the internet”, whatever that means, to take a more active role in politics.
However, I think you are too negative on what was accomplished. It was not at all a given that the Wikpedia community would even enter the fray of politics. There were many who argued that encyclopedists shouldn’t get involved in such things. Or that SOPA just targeted Bad, UnAmerican People anyway. And that any really onerous law could be resisted or repealed if it ever came about. There were even difficulties in finding the correct process to even decide this issue, since Wikipedia is designed around eventual consensus, not quick action. But in the end Wikipedians found a way to unite, and discovered they were strong.
This is a milestone in the development of Internet culture — a message from the internet to traditional political culture, but also a message to ourselves that such things are possible.
The blackout is a little bit like the Gandhian tactic of going on a hunger strike. Wikipedia is known for its relatively monastic ethics, and thus can play the role of a “holier” entity willing to harm itself to get a point across. But of course, you can’t resort to this tactic all the time. And neither did Gandhi. He used a multitude of tactics.
The question now is what tactics will allow “the internet” have such a voice on a regular basis, without having to hijack existing communities like Wikipedia, or wait for businesses like Reddit, Google et al. to start the ball rolling, or take drastic action such as a blackout.
#5 by Smári McCarthy on February 10, 2012 - 07:15
Agree. I didn’t mean it to be as negative as you and some others have read it – I think it was a Herculean feat in a lot of ways, and signifies a certain coming of age regarding political awareness of a lot of online communities (not just Wikipedia). That said, the single shot problem is one I wanted to draw attention to, and it seems to have worked… but now we need to get people together to figure out what exactly the offensive strategy is. I don’t think waiting on the corporate interests to take action is going to be automagically a good idea, although we should definitely foster relationships with the companies that share our values, however far they are shared (and be careful to be critical of them and others that oppose our values, as far as that goes!)…