Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet (15 page)
Authors: and David Moon Patrick Ruffini David Segal
Tags: #Bisac Code 1: POL035000
Being one of a few dozen people in the country who spent their days and nights on Internet politics in those early days led to me fulfill a childhood dream of working in Presidential politics, eventually founding successful companies at the intersection of politics and technology. Simply by being one of the first—whether it was setting up a website (1995), blogging (2001), or joining Twitter (2007)—I found a voice I otherwise wouldn’t have had. Like many others who pursue their passions and make a livelihood for themselves online, I owe a lot to the Internet.
What I loved about the Internet was that it leveled the playing field and disrupted traditional ways of doing things. As a libertarian, I marveled at the complete freedom it afforded its participants. The Internet could serve as a
model for self-government. No bureaucrat controlled it, and you didn’t need permission to hit the Publish button. Free speech was finally and truly, free.
The words penned by former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (itself issued in the immediate aftermath of the CDA), have stuck with me in the years since:
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
And:
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
Barlow’s Declaration had a certain bombastic idealism that one feels funny about quoting, but at its core, it is a well-placed warning about arrogant power,
which knowing nothing about decentralized networks seeks to control them anyway.
In “cyberspace”—a quaint way of describing this new world—order emerges organically from the edges of the network, rather than from law books or government directives. As Larry Downes writes in these pages, the system by which the Internet governs itself couldn’t be more democratic:
The political philosophy of the Internet, though still largely unformed, is by no means inarticulate. The aspirations of Internet users largely reflect the best features of the technology itself—open, meritocratic, non-proprietary, and transparent. Its central belief is the power of innovation to make things better, and its major tenet is a ruthless economic principle that treats information as currency, and sees any obstacle to its free flow as inefficient friction to be engineered out of existence.
Those seeking to understand what kind of governance Internet users are willing to accept would do well to start by studying the engineering that establishes the network and how it is governed. The key protocols and standards that make the Internet work—that make the Internet the Internet—are developed and modified by voluntary committees of engineers, who meet virtually to debate the merits of new features, design changes, and other basic enhancements.
The engineering task forces are meritocratic and open. The best ideas win through vigorous debate and testing. No one has seniority or a veto. There’s no influence peddling or lobbyists. The engineers are allergic to hypocrisy and public relations rhetoric. It’s as pure a form of democracy as has ever been implemented. And it works amazingly well.
For libertarians (like myself), the Internet holds the great hope of re-injecting ideals of freedom into the rest of society by allowing a parallel economic space to develop outside the reach of government. And in the movement against SOPA, among the digital elite on both the right and left, we saw a beautiful consensus emerge in favor of emergent, peer-to-peer innovation against would-be oligarchs of all stripes. Right and left may embrace different facets of the Internet ideal, but at its core lies a shared belief in people and networks, not governments, shaping the future.
At the beginning of this story, in 2010, the appeal of Internet freedom was at a low ebb. Governments across the globe were increasingly putting their stamp on the medium with nationalistic laws censoring certain types of content and stepping up their regulatory scrutiny of the world’s most hyper-competitive industry.
When Senator Patrick Leahy introduced the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, or COICA, on September 20, 2010, only a small handful of tech policy experts took notice. At the time, it did not occur to most senators or their staffs that manipulating the Domain Name System,
or DNS, solely at the behest of a single industry, would cause any controversy whatsoever.
When I first read the bill that October, the notion that a bill like this could see the light of day was jaw-dropping. On the one hand, elected officials celebrated the Internet, used it in their campaigns, and extolled its disruptive potential in visits to Silicon Valley. Yet, under the guise of anodyne anti-piracy measures, we were about to give the U.S. government to power to disrupt its core architecture by allowing the U. S. Department of Justice the power to blacklist websites and tinker with the DNS system in ways the vast majority of Internet engineers thought unworkable.
The COICA crisis became an opportunity for the Internet to make its stand, as forcefully as it had since 1996. And to make an impact, given its sizeable reach into every corner of society and the economy. For me, this was an opportunity to recapture the spirit of the Internet’s pioneer days and defend the medium from a clear and present danger, uniting political activists on the left and the right in the process.
The grassroots campaign began a few days ahead of a planned November 2010 markup in the Senate Judiciary Committee on the bill. I bought the domain
dontcensorthenet.com
, which got right to the heart of the matter: COICA would censor the Internet.
While startups rightly saw COICA as an affront to their business models and economic livelihoods, the bill would succeed or fail to the degree that regular people believed it censored them. Because this was a political fight, it was critical that our message be well understood by political activists who had the ear of Congressional representatives.
Tea Party activists, like the liberal netroots before them, had used the Internet to organize politically, recently fueling Republican victories in the November 2010 midterm elections. If pressure from the grassroots could be brought to bear, it was unlikely that the new Republican House would ever bring a bill to the floor that would grant Eric Holder’s Justice Department the power to regulate the Internet.
Patrick Ruffini’s effort to muster opposition to COICA, PIPA, and SOPA among his right-leaning confederates had him employ the effective strategy of using President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder as foils. The poster above was created by Ruffini’s group for the annual Conservative Political Action Committee conference.
If we didn’t act, however, there was a danger that the bill would move so quickly, and opposition from the tech sector seem so esoteric, that these arguments could easily have been missed entirely. For their part, Hollywood had tried to portray COICA as no more controversial than renaming a post office. Looming large over the debate was a sense that content industry lobbyists had this sewn up, and numerous times, tech industry sources warned that this could be passed, perhaps by voice vote, in the closing days of the 111th Congress.
The early strategy was no more and no less than: stall. Play for time. And hope that in the intervening time enough doubts could be raised that proponents could be persuaded to amend the bill. Not defeat it. But improve it. Such was the pessimism in the technology policy community at the time.
Don’t Censor the Net would launch with a core group of conservative bloggers co-signing our petition when it went live on November 16, 2010.
Right before launch, I traded emails with Aaron Swartz, founder of Demand Progress and an early force in reddit, marking the beginning of the collaboration between the two groups:
From: Aaron Swartz
To: Patrick Ruffini
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2010 16:03:23 -0500
Subject: coica
Hi, Patrick—I’ve noticed you’ve tweeted a couple times about COICA.
We’d love to do some more work with the conservative/libertarian community—it seems like they should be against this big government takeover of the Internet—and I was curious if you had any advice on how to get their attention.
Thanks,
Aaron
From: Patrick Ruffini
To: Aaron Swartz
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2010 16:17:57 -0500
Subject: Re: coica
Working on this right now actually.
What we’re hoping to do is provide a friendly spot for people on the right to engage on this issue.
We’ve seen the usual message board chatter and think this is a good opportunity to elevate and get some bipartisan movement going.
Demand Progress was an activist group on the left, and advocated on the sorts of issues that would have placed us as diametric opposites on the political spectrum, especially during the Bush years. Yet I would develop a fruitful collaboration with David Moon and David Segal who carried the organization forward through the SOPA & PIPA battle, continuing with this book.
A right-left alliance was not only essential to building a broad, bipartisan populist coalition aligned against an out-of-touch lobbyist-driven elite, but in the process I learned a life’s worth of lessons about winning policy fights from all angles—both in playing the inside game, and knowing when to apply outside pressure. I had been used to winning (and losing) in the context of a political campaign, and I valued the similar experience Demand Progress brought to the table from the other side of the political spectrum.
Many in Washington talk about applying political campaign tactics to policy fights, but the truth is that we were overdue for an Internet-driven disruption
of the lobbying and policy process of the kind we had seen time and again in politics. Much of my career has been about fostering this sort of technological shift in the campaign world, and so I relished the challenge of applying the same lessons to the impregnable world of Congressional influence.
Today, “social media revolutions” are happening with increasing frequency and speed. Unlike past grassroots movements, these movements are self-organized, decentralized, and global in scope. The anti-SOPA movement had no leader and no central organizing hub. It shared this trait in common with movements ranging from the Tea Party to the Arab Spring. Post-SOPA, it appears to be getting progressively easier for social media to force its way on those in power. When Planned Parenthood prevailed over the Susan G. Komen Foundation, instant comparisons were drawn to SOPA. ACTA—the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a document with many SOPA-like provisions that had languished in relative obscurity for years—became a cause celebre, primarily in Europe, with Poland leading the way. And there is also a sense that, with enough of a knack for making something go viral, social media movements can be conjured up at a moment’s notice. There is no better example of this than the early March KONY 2012 video, which generated forty six million YouTube views in 48 hours.
We live in a changed world because of the distributed actions of millions of people during the SOPA and PIPA battle. The people in this story happened to see and observe how this change unfolded, starting in the very beginning, when things looked quite bleak and no one gave the Internet any chance of succeeding.
