For the first time in its eleven year history, Wikipedia is deliberately offline today. The site that, more than any other, believes in making reliable information free to everyone has deliberately disabled itself to protest the potential stupidity of the American government. It’s been joined by many others, everything from big name sites like Boing Boing and Reddit down to little personal blogs. You’ve got to give the noxious twins of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act credit for one thing, they’ve made the great, brawling cacophony of the internet angrier and more unified than it has ever been.
That alone is a worthwhile moment in the still fresh history of humanity’s most expansive tool, and there are a lot of ways it can be interpreted. Charitably you can see it as a protest of the informed and active against the ignorant and lazy, of people who work to make life better for others against those who would use their position to benefit themselves and their free spending colleagues. Less charitably you can see it as a chest thumping exercise in self congratulation, the amorphous internet community openly declaring that it really is smarter than everyone else.
It goes almost without saying that I tend toward the former view, but that’s why the latter interpretation, pushed by bought off politicians and the shamelessly mendacious idiots they serve, is more interesting. There really are people of great power out there who think that fucking with DNS – the good faith backbone of the system that supports almost every major transaction we conduct – is a good idea. That’s like forcing people to legally change their names for a speeding ticket, and so what if no one ever gets their mail again.
Of course, it’s actually worse than that. They think that mentioning something should be the same as doing something. That’s like imprisoning someone for mentioning crime. They think that freezing the money of a group is an appropriate response to unpopular speech. That’s like bankrupting someone for saying the emperor has no clothes. They think helping people conceal themselves from the worst governments on Earth should be punishable because someone, somewhere, might see a movie without paying $8.95. Worst of all, they want all of these measures to be enforced not through the courts or by the government, but by private organizations and whatever vicious dogs they see fit to hire. Oh, and it stands almost no chance of actually curbing intellectual property piracy, in the U.S. or elsewhere.
There’s a reason these two bills have sparked such universal and vitriolic opposition. They are fundamental attacks on not just the internet, but on the very idea that someone else doesn’t have a right to tell you what you can and cannot say. That these attacks come in the form of authorizing one private entity to tell another to shut the fuck up or else is simply a sign of the times.
Like so many other political battles of this day and age, it’s about those who already have. In this case, it’s media companies who publicize television shows, movies and music wanting to keep things going the way they have been. They’re afraid of the future because it might mean less (though nothing close to penury) for them, and they’re perfectly willing to burn down everything else if it means stopping that from happening.
It’s the same story that’s characterized our politics since the dawn of the Republic, and it’s grown wildly out of control in the last few decades. Whether you’re talking about banksters keeping their unjustifiable and enormously expensive tax loopholes (carried interest, anyone?), the insurance industry writing itself into health care reform as a legally required skimmer, extractive industries exploiting the government to avoid paying for the things they take out of the ground and the messes they leave behind, or any other large, established and deep pocketed group, the government is at an historic level in terms of ease-of-bribing. The specifics vary – the last time the media colluders got this excited it was yet another copyright extension – but the overall pattern is always the same. A small group, a veritable special interest, gets favorable treatment for the government at the expense of everyone else.
When called on this, as they have been to an impressive and heartwarming degree on SOPA and PIPA, their response is always the same: trust us, we know what we’re doing and you don’t. They’re lying, of course. They always are. Environmental regulations won’t bankrupt the oil industry anymore than minimum wage laws bankrupt small businesses or financial regulation cripples banks. Nor, for that matter, has on-line piracy substantially hurt movies, television or music. It isn’t just that the problem is smaller than they say, it’s that the problem might not exist at all, and it certainly isn’t worth blowing up the internet to not fix a non-problem.
Today there’s been a real fight against censorship and for free speech, and it’s nice to have corporate behemoths like Google on the side of the good guys. But while messing with the internet arouses more attention than most of these fights do, it’s important to recognize that this is just another battle in the very old war of a tiny group reaching into everyone else’s lives for their own narrow benefit. If SOPA and PIPA die, then that’s a real accomplishment. And if, when they are inevitably resurrected (and this isn’t the first time the media cowards have tried this) they are defeated again, those too will be real accomplishments. But amid the cheers, it should be noted that this is a rare win for the public good, and that these sorts of fights shouldn’t have to be this damn hard.
