“I-unno.” – Homer Simpson
After last Wednesday’s unprecedented strike and the Congressional panic it induced, the internet – roughly speaking – took something of a victory lap. Some of these were better than others, but most had the decency to point out that the struggle was far from over. Even among that sober strain, however, fundamental stupidity about politics in early 21st Century America seeped through the cracks.
The day after the blackout, TechCrunch ran a guest post by a guy named David Binetti, whom they described as:
the CEO and co-founder of Votizen, a consumer technology company based in Mountain View, CA, focused on giving voters a greater voice.
Binetti notes the size of the protest as well as the remarkable turnaround in the fortunes of SOPA and PIPA; but he loses the tether to real politics rather quickly when he uses the success of the blackout to argue against more sustained internet lobbying in Washington. His operating assumption is that, should the vile ideas in SOPA and PIPA ever rear their heads again, the internet will come down from its mountaintop fortress, kick some ass, and then order will be restored. This indicates a level of ignorance about how Congress works on a par with Congress’s ignorance about how the internet works:
In truth, for SOPA this is more likely a retreat than a surrender. The fight will continue, and here’s where things will really get interesting. Professional lobbyists are no doubt approaching the venture capitalists who have supported the anti-SOPA movement, explaining in compelling terms why they will need to have effective representation, a permanent organization to support their interests, and a budget to match the $50M+ coffers held by the MPAA. Most inside the Beltway are likely to interpret yesterday’s activities as a flash in the pan, will hunker down to wait out this phase, and insist that this is a K-Street battle that must be fought on K-Street.
This is understandable — arms merchants, more than anything else, want people shooting at each other — but doing so would likely be a mistake for the movement. If the tech community plays the lobbyist/money game and hires its own lobbyists, then it is playing on their opponent’s game on their opponent’s turf.
Instead, they should see what is happening in this rising opposition to SOPA in more familiar terms; namely, that the political industry itself is under massive disruption, and this is just the beginning. Once the population at large appreciates its newly found influence and starts to see that getting involved really does make a difference, it is likely to generate more activity and activism, leading to greater results. In fact, I believe historians may look back on SOPA as an early example of a new era of political engagement based on social media, much as how the 1964 Daisy ad precipitated a new era of political activity based on television.
That is hopelessly childish and the exact opposite of what champions of the internet as a medium should be doing.
People who just dip in and out of the news have the impression that Congress has debates, and then every once and a while there’s a big vote, and those things are talked about by informed people. But that isn’t how Congress works at all. Whenever it’s in session, Congress is voting. It’s voting on things no one cares about, it’s voting on things that will never be reported by anyone outside of the Congressional Record, it’s voting on amendments to amendments and the movement of bills within committees. Congress is always voting, which is why the spectacular protest theory of pressuring Congress will always lose to the steady, day by day, cocktail by cocktail, vote by vote theory of pressuring Congress.
There is no rule anywhere that says that the various provisions of SOPA and PIPA have to be placed in one big bill that the internet can take notice of. Little things can be slipped into a budget bill here, a farm appropriation there, and the only way to keep an eye on those things is to pay very well connected people a shitload of money to have your interests always at heart. It’s not pretty, and it’s even less democratic, but for now that is the way that things work.
Consider 1964, which Binetti invokes as a similar dawn of a new era. The big legislation of the day, Medicare, the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, didn’t get passed because Lyndon Johnson gave a speech or Martin Luther King led a march. They got passed because of ground level lobbying and organizing by labor unions, activists, and deep pocketed organizations that knew how to make members of Congress squirm. Moreover, those things took sustained effort over years, not just one spectacular event.
Wikipedia cannot maintain that kind of engagement. It doesn’t have the budget or the personnel. It isn’t a site designed to foster political engagement, and neither is Reddit or Tumblr. Those sites, the uncountable others that went on strike last week, and most importantly their user bases, simply aren’t designed with constant Congressional action in mind.
To his credit, Binetti’s startup “Votizen” is geared toward that kind of relentless pressure. But in addition to only being a tiny startup, it’s also roughly three thousand miles off target:
Contact
Votizen
548 Market Street
San Francisco, Calif. 94104
The only way to keep an eye on Congress is to have a constant physical presence in Washington, D.C. There is no alternative. Hands need to be shaken, aides and members of Congress need to be harassed and taken out to lunch. Meetings and hearings need to be attended. And all of this needs to happen year round.
The proponents of SOPA, PIPA, and all the anti-internet provisions they still hold dear understand this. Here’s the MPAA’s contact page:
Contact Us
Washington, D.C.
1600 Eye St., NW
Washington, D.C. 20006
They list nine other cities on that page, but Washington is right at the top.
The internet is a wonderful long distance communication tool, and last Wednesday’s blackout was a spectacular and wonderfully effective display of that. But if you want representation in the U.S. government, even if all you want is to be left alone, you need to be in Washington, greasing the right palms, all the time.
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos