Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet (23 page)

I knew that I had to raise my voice.

What I didn’t know was that in a few days, the entire Internet would be rebelling against SOPA, successfully turning the tide on a piece of legislation whose passage had days before seemed all but certain.

My testimony, which I had assumed would be a small quixotic gesture protesting a foregone conclusion, ended up being just one more voice in a resounding global chorus, one which simultaneously defended and demonstrated the power of a free and open Internet.

The defeat of SOPA was a true victory. But for those of us (un?)lucky enough to work as professional recording artists, the question that still looms is, how, or perhaps even if, we should be trying to make a living on our art. Do we forego labels and CD sales completely and take a leap of faith on Kickstarter? Do we have the kind of fan base that will support that? Is there a cloud-based model that is fair to artists?

To be honest, though I consider myself both an activist and a musician, I actually find myself surprisingly UNinterested in learning the ins and outs of the music industry itself; both the one that is dying, and the new one that is being born. I want our message to get out, and I want to be able to work full time as a musician, but how exactly that happens I don’t particularly care. I want to create art that engages people to take part in transforming this world, but when it comes to my own place in a rapidly transforming industry, I would be happy to let someone else do it.

This, of course, is not really an option. We’re all going to have to chart our own course, both individually as creators, and in dialogue with one another as a creative community. We’re all going to have to care. Ultimately, the new direction will require the same faith that the old one required, a faith that if people find enough value in our art, we will be able to make a living at it. If we believe that, we’re going to be alright.

SOPA’s sponsor, Rep. Lamar Smith became a popular target for Internet artists, satirists and others looking for a villain in the fight. The art above was created by Chad Rocco and was a frequently circulated image among SOPA opponents.

Introduced a few days before Halloween, it’s clear in hindsight that SOPA was a grab-bag full of unimaginably valuable treats for Internet activists—even if it at first looked like the Content Industry was absconding with all the candy. Protect IP was a very bad bill, but it was a bit too abstract to explain in a sound bite, and if, as Senator Wyden repeatedly asserted, COICA and PIPA were “bunker-busting cluster bombs,” that meant that SOPA was the Nuclear Option. The Internet Blacklist Bill framing had worked with our audience of grassroots activists, but it was difficult to take things to the next level and get the web platforms involved: Google, the music streaming service Grooveshark, and a few others had been tracking the legislation closely, but the likely impacts of PIPA were too nebulous to explain to tech start-ups with minimal or non-existent legal teams and which weren’t attuned to (or actively recoiled from) whatever icky thing was going on in D.C., no matter its public policy implications.

SOPA would undermine all of the best parts of the Internet, forcing sites that relied on user-generated content to police that material before it ever even made it online. Foreign sites would have to prevent certain content from being uploaded or risk being blocked from American view. Domestic sites would have to scrub out any links to such blocked sites. And SOPA’s authors had targeted the domestic web, via COICA and PRO-IP before it, betraying their ultimate
designs. All of that is what spurred millions of people into action and what convinced countless online platforms to mobilize their users.

It’s impossible to know exactly what Lamar Smith was thinking, but if I may pull my stuffy old legislator’s garb out of the closet it’s been in for a couple of years and speculate: Smith thought he was being savvy. He’d introduce legislation that was more extreme than PIPA, making PIPA look reasonable, thereby helping ensure its passage: it would be the new “compromise” between the extremes of “leave well enough alone” and “that runaway train loaded up with dirty bombs that Lamar Smith introduced last week.” Maybe, just maybe, he’d even get lucky and pass SOPA outright: Hollywood had its talons in the bulk of the Democratic caucus; the Chamber of Commerce could force enough Republicans to the table and offer them nose-plugs that they could use to avoid the stench of those pansy Los Angeles effetes whose bidding they were being compelled to do.

This sort of negotiation is standard fare in legislative bodies: Lawmakers are constantly introducing legislation that they never intend to see pass. One might be trying to make a particular piece of legislation look more reasonable, or to neutralize another bad bill: it’s a strange metaphysics that governs the workings of a legislative chamber and the decisions by its leaders about which bills to move forward.

For instance, during most of my four years in the Rhode Island House of Reps, the Speaker of the House managed a detente between two wings of the coalition who backed him, governed by a farcical calculus housed somewhere inside of his cranium. There was an understanding that gay marriage and legislation to require a 24-hour waiting period before abortions were inextricably bound to one another: either both bills would move forward in tandem, or neither would proceed.

There’s a broad base of conservative Democrats in deep-blue Rhode Island, so the waiting period would have vested, while gay marriage probably would’ve failed, and certainly would have been vetoed by our conservative Republican governor if it had managed to sneak through. (He’d even vetoed a bill I’d sponsored allowing one member of a domestic partnership to claim the other’s remains and oversee his or her funeral.) The equation spurred a framework of corollaries that were even more absurd yet: when civil unions or other domestic partnership legislation inched forward, the anti-choice activists expected a bill in return—something lesser than a full-fledged waiting period: perhaps a pre-abortion ultrasound mandate.

I was usually happy to play the progressive activist and introduce bills that served a purpose even though they weren’t meant to pass: one year a variety of vicious anti-immigrant bills came far too close to passage, so the next year we put in a menu of pro-immigrant bills, altering the metaphysical balance and neutralizing the bad ones—doing nothing became the compromise. A friend introduced a pot legalization bill, in part to make pot decriminalization more palatable, which in turn made medical marijuana seem more reasonable—and the latter two subsequently passed.

For all of his inanities, Glenn Beck was astute to have pinpointed the importance of what’s known on the right as the “Overton Window”—that
portion of the political spectrum whose ideas are treated as part of the “legitimate” discourse—and the importance of having ideological vanguards to “move the middle” and broaden scope of the debate. I’m already lamenting the inevitable collapse in the spectrum of allowable discourse in Congress, now that the left and right poles—Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul—are both departing. (I’m especially concerned about Kucinich’s departure, as the left fringe of the spectrum gets far less attention in “serious” circles than does the right.)

But there’s a danger in the sort of negotiation Smith was undertaking: if you propose something that’s too far beyond the pale you risk making a mockery of yourself and undermining the whole project. That’s what Smith did, and the poor guy surely had no clue what was coming. If Smith had simply introduced his own version of PIPA word-for-word it almost certainly would have passed. Instead we have him to thank for a newly politicized Internet public that will fight to make sure that nothing half as bad as PIPA ever passes again.

Once SOPA was introduced we could run to the highest hilltops in Farmville (are there hills in Farmville?) and cry out: “SOPA (or at least the line of reasoning that led to it) would shut all of this down! Would you people please start paying attention?”

And that’s what we did.

We shot out a Halloween-costumed write-up of SOPA to our members—“It’s Alive … It’s a grab-bag of Halloween goodies for a handful of big corporations—but for us it’s Frankenstein’s monster, cobbled together from halfborn bills, set to suffocate free speech and innovation and terrorize consumers and Internet users”—and steered in a quick hundred thousand or so emails to Congress, asking members not to sign on as co-sponsors. We’d been buoyed by the low number of cosponsors at introduction—far fewer than had supported PIPA, even though it was drawing from a legislative body with more than fourfold the members—and the fact that they were only Hollywood’s hardest shills; we wanted to freeze out other potential backers before they became wedded to it.

Fight for the Future (for which I was doing some contract work at the time) took the lead in organizing the critical “American Censorship Day” in mid-November—described below, it’s when reddit and Tumblr formally joined the cause—and Demand Progress provided some tech support for them. The effort steered many hundreds of thousands of new constituent contacts to Congress.

Then Demand Progress worked with Senator Wyden’s office on a new tactic to help make contacting lawmakers more compelling, one that’s replicable beyond just this fight: Wyden had been threatening to filibuster PIPA since May, and his staff had been turning over what he’d actually do to eat up some floor time and turn the event into a spectacle (you don’t need to filibuster Jimmy Stewart-style under the current rules of the Senate, but you create more havoc and get more credit with your supporters if you do). We offered up a suggestion: no reading out of the phone book, no reciting Portland’s hippest recipes for freerange venison with ambercup, kale, and peppercorn sauce, or engaging with other traditional fodder for filibuster floor-time filling. Let us tell the Internet that you’ll read the names of people who send emails in opposition to SOPA/ PIPA, announcing them as proud protectors of Internet freedom—that’ll really
get activists going make them feel like there’s an extra value in emailing their lawmakers. His office, ever willing to collaborate with activists and help test out new tactics, bit.