Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet (2 page)

While there is indeed a mental health crisis upon us, it’s important not to pathologize all those who despair. Therapists, medicine, and lifestyle changes will benefit many—presuming one can afford them. But Aaron’s way to allay others’ misery and reduce the likelihood that they might suffer the fate that befell him would be to focus on what could have saved his own life: he’d aim for the root causes of so much human anguish. He’d strive to upend a system that hangs a lifetime in prison over the head of an activist who harmed nobody, or destroys people’s lives over petty drug offenses, or forces millions of workers to spend decades slaving away at poverty wages without access to adequate healthcare.

We are sorrowful and we are angry, but we’ve found some solace in the vast public outcry at the injustice of his predicament—and in lawmakers’ demonstrated willingness to take on Aaron’s cause, and ours, as their own by addressing some of these structural problems.

Aaron was an ideologue, but not a partisan. He was definitively progressive, but didn’t care much about party stripe, and was willing, or even excited, to work with conservatives and right-libertarians when he agreed with them. The familiar left-right, single-axis paradigm sometimes breaks down, frequently so in the civil liberties and Internet freedom space. As was the case during the SOPA fight, as described in detail in this book, some of our staunchest allies will be on the right, inclusive of Republican lawmakers, and we are pleased to have an opportunity to work in common cause with them.

As of this writing the House Government Oversight Committee led by Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Elijah Cummings (D-MD) has initiated an investigation into his prosecution. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) have drafted legislation called Aaron’s Law, to reform the statute under which he was prosecuted. Legislation to provide open access to publicly funded research has been introduced by Senator John Cornyn (R-TX)—it was already planned prior to his passing, but Demand Progress and others are excited to support it.

It’s hard to know exactly what Aaron would make of all of this: he seemed not to always understand how much he mattered, to his friends and family, to hundreds of people whom he worked with over the course of his short life, and to millions across the world who never even met him. But he’d be hopeful that something positive might emerge from the tragedy of his passing.

And he’d be happy that so many care to learn more about the SOPA fight that was one of the highlights of the last year or two of his life. One of the
hallmarks of his particularly humble brand of brilliance was that he didn’t assume every idea he had was superior, just for being borne of his own mind: he developed hypotheses, and he tested them. He exhorted us, “Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.” He was adamant that “the revolution will be A/B tested.” So read what follows critically, and let’s try to gain a sense of what worked and what didn’t, so that we can put up an even stronger effort the next time we need to come together to save the Internet.

—David Segal
February, 2013

The SOPA/PIPA battles brought together a coalition that may be unprecedented in the diversity of viewpoints and backgrounds of its members. But those who came together shared in common that they could all say: “I’m pro-Internet” – This photo was taken at an emergency protest organized by the New York Tech Meetup community on January 18, 2012. Photo by Craig Cannon.
http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech/photos/5468462/86976852/

Between the fall of 2010 and early 2012, untold millions of Americans urged lawmakers to protect the Internet and oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act and its predecessor and companion bills.

It’s quite possibly the largest single, directed form of (non-electoral) activism as far as number of American participants—and that’s fitting, as the legislation would have undermined the greatest facilitator of the democratic impulse that’s ever been known to humankind.

Together, we used the Internet to save the Internet, and registered a resounding victory against all apparent odds and in direct contradiction of the intuitions of the most seasoned establishment political actors and lobbies like the Chamber of Commerce and the Motion Picture Association of America. This is that story.

Most Americans are familiar with the extraordinary Internet Blackout of January 18th, 2012, but to get to that moment took months and years of toil by dedicated activists, online, in the streets, and in the halls of power. In an age of polarized partisan politics, it took an alliance between the far left, the far right, and countless concerned Americans whose proclivities span the vast spectrum in between. We looked past differences and came together to uphold values shared by the overwhelming majority of Americans—and people from around the globe, for that matter. In so doing, we cast a spotlight on much of what can still be good about our political processes, but also helped illuminate the underlying structural decrepitude that made it possible that politicians would blindly push legislation that so clearly controverted the will of so many of their constituents.

In order to win, the Internet would turn the SOPA/PIPA battle into a testing ground for activists’ tools, messages, and techniques—and all manner of viral satire, meme, and webcam ranting you could possibly imagine. Countless developers, websites, organizations, and even businesses tried to outdo each other in their activist creativity. But behind the scenes and beneath the seeming chaos of the public disruption, there were very real conversations happening between groups that do not usually play together. The “white shoe” lobbyists, the “white paper” policy advocates, technologists, venture capitalists, bloggers, and activists were in regular contact to discuss timing and strategy considerations. The participants in these dynamic coalitions often held wildly divergent viewpoints, but all shared an interest in defending Internet Freedom.

Essentially, anyone with a web presence (and who could therefore steer impressions to SOPA/PIPA content) could participate in the advocacy battle. It was decentralized, but it was organized, as we were actively trying to orchestrate a calculated mayhem.

Contained herein are essays written by dozens of people who were involved in those efforts. Authors of the essays that comprise
Hacking Politics
don’t necessarily endorse each other’s opinions—and, in fact, their opinions vary widely and often contradict one another. That’s precisely part of the point of this book: to demonstrate the ways in which people of distinct backgrounds, ideologies, and interests joined together in common cause to fight legislation that would’ve censored the Internet.

We don’t claim this to be a comprehensive accounting of everything that happened during the anti-SOPA/PIPA fight. Far from it. But it does represent the vantage points of an important group of activists who were invested in this fight for months or even years. The following pages are an account of their perspectives on the effort to beat SOPA/PIPA, and so necessarily elevate these viewpoints. Countless others who aren’t represented here also played critical roles in that fight, and surely have intriguing stories to tell as well. We are aware that this book is United States-centric. There’s critical work being undertaken in support of Internet freedom the world over, but we operate predominantly in the domestic sphere and that’s where the SOPA/PIPA fight was won, so it’s where we’ve focused. Would that we had the resources to engage more deeply with our brothers and sisters around the globe!

Demand Progress and Don’t Censor the Net—the organizations that the co-editors of this book help manage—are new groups without a longstanding institutional structure. We are well aware of the debts that we owe to longer-standing organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Free Press, and others, as well as many key academics and myriad rank-and-file activists who care passionately about the issues at hand. Without their years (sometimes decades) of work, our organizations wouldn’t exist, and we wouldn’t have been able to play the roles we took over the course of this glorious effort. In fact, without the toil of so many conscientious groups and people, we’d surely have lost the fight for an open Internet long ago. We’re honored that many activists and organizations for whom we have so much respect have contributed essays to this book, though it’s impossible to do justice to their longstanding work over the course of just a few hundred pages. A stark indicator of the depth of the gratitude that we owe the longer-standing organizations: While most readers of this book will be well aware of the 2012 Internet Blackout, far fewer remember—and several were probably not yet alive for—the 1996 blackout to oppose the Communications Decency Act (which was later found to be unconstitutional).

Screenshot of the 1996 Internet blackout in opposition to the Communications Decency Act.

Screenshot of Wikipedia’s home page on January 18, 2012.

As we strive to be as inclusive as possible, and in the spirit of the creative chaos of the Internet, this book mashes up dozens of contributions into a coherent chronological narrative of the blow-by-blow of the anti-SOPA/PIPA organizing effort. It opens in the early fall of 2010, when the editors of this book joined the fray. We have also included what we hope are insightful analyses of what happened, from a variety of different vantage points. Some essayists were engaged in the anti-SOPA/PIPA cause for more than a year—and some were party to Internet freedom efforts for years before that—while others joined the fight in its waning days, even while playing critical roles therein. So there
are necessarily some redundancies and some jumps forward and backward in time, but you’re smart enough to keep it all straight.

Some brief explanations of frequently-cited legislation: