Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet (58 page)

In the realm of political advocacy, it doesn’t get much better than this. Amidst the high fives and hat tips, I think it is particularly instructive to think through why the tactic proved so successful. This will not be the last time that legacy content industries seek to extract control from the medium. Often in issue politics, winning a victory only buys you time until the next fight. If we take the wrong lessons away from the successful Day of Action, then the next effort may not turn out so well. I would argue that the blackout succeeded on three levels—mediating citizen mobilization, directly driving the news agenda, and direct exposure to Members of Congress.

First, consider the Day of Action through the normal lens. Most advocacy tactics in American politics revolve around mobilizing citizens to contact their elected representatives. This is basically a souped-up version of the standard action alerts that MoveOn, Demand Progress, Organizing for America, and other advocacy groups send daily to their members. The numbers are quite high, but we should put those in perspective: heavy phone and email traffic is nothing new for Congressional offices. The side that generates heavier constituent outrage doesn’t always win. Constituent outrage is just one of many signals that Congress considers.

They also consider expert testimony (firmly opposed to the bill, in this case), and the will of wealthy donors/affected industries (often expressed through lobbyists—an excess of Hollywood money and lobbying influence is what got us the terrible bill in the first place). Viewed through this traditional lens, the tactic is a limited success. One should not expect that similarly-sized e-petitions would usually produce such dramatic results.

The second level was a news event in itself. The average Day of Action is, simply put, not very newsworthy. Advocacy groups churn out press releases, but journalists generally ignore them. That isn’t because of a corporate bias in newsrooms. It’s because advocacy campaigns are an everyday occurrence in the nation’s capital. They usually aren’t particularly newsworthy. The SOPA blackout was different. Wikipedia going dark drew wide coverage. Even if you didn’t happen to visit Wikipedia on January 18th, you may have visited a news site or tuned in to the
Colbert Report
. This forces politicians who were otherwise ignoring the issue to take a stand. Congress discusses thousands of bills every year. Reporters don’t call and ask for positions on every issue, every day. On the day of the blackout, reporters were calling about SOPA. And Members of Congress treat news coverage itself as an approximation of public opinion—if an issue is in the news, they presume their constituents care about it (Herbst 1998). So part of what made the blackout effective was that it was, itself, a news event.

Notice, however, that the blackout was treated as news specifically because it was original. This was the “Internet public” speaking out like never before. Wikipedia doesn’t take political stances. Google doesn’t call on web-searchers to contact Congress. The freshness of the tactic is what makes it newsworthy. If Wikipedia did this once a month, it would quickly cease to merit wider media attention. This is a process I call “advocacy inflation” (Karpf 2012). The value of any given tactic is often tied to its novelty—as a rule of thumb, you want to craft tactics that are either larger than your target is used to (if they usually receive one hundred phone calls on every issue, mobilize one thousand phone calls) or different than your target is used to (if they’re used to phone calls, organize twenty people to show up at their town hall meeting instead).

Advocacy inflation happens for two reasons. First, tactics lose their novelty and, thus, become less newsworthy in their own right. This is particularly important in online organizing. There are plenty of reporters and news outlets that cover technology and society. The first time we use the Internet in a new way for politics, reporters will write stories about the effort itself. By the fifth time, it will be treated as the new normal. The second reason is that advocacy organizations imitate each other. Think of it as a noise-to-signal problem. If an organization finds that a new tactic is successful in attracting Congressional attention, peer organizations will start to emulate. The first emails to Congress were fresh and original, a way to hear from constituents that cut through the pile of form letters submitted every day. Today, emails to Congress often go basically unread. They are even spammier than the form letters. There’s greater marginal value in being the first activists to try a new form of pressure tactic than in catching up with the innovators.

There’s a third level of influence here as well: direct exposure. Congressional offices are busy places. The nice thing about the blackout is that it cut directly through the clutter. At some point in the day on January 18th, at least one staffer in every office Googled something or looked something up on Wikipedia. Many Members of Congress probably did so themselves, in fact. And when they did, they were confronted with something they’d never seen before on those sites.

The blackout cut through the din of constituent calls and emails, lobby visits, and policy briefings. The targets of the action saw it themselves, and it grabbed attention in a way that everyday persuasion and influence tactics rarely can.

Notice that this third level only works because of the major sites involved. The anti-SOPA campaign was not led by Google and Wikipedia, and its success cannot be laid solely at their feet. But, as great as it was that DailyKos and Boing Boing took part in the day of action, the tactic would have been much weaker if those had been the largest sites involved. Those sites draw tech-savvy and/or politics-savvy audiences. Even with the cross-partisan support of conservative sites like RedState, the average American is unlikely to see the content, and the only Congressional staffers who will see it are the ones (usually, interns) charged with monitoring the blogs.

Let’s be clear about this third level of influence, then. It was a remarkable tactic, and demonstrates that the big companies in the digital environment are beginning to recognize that they have to push back against the big companies from the traditional entertainment environment. But that’s a pretty meek revolution. Google is still a corporation, “Don’t Be Evil” motto notwithstanding (Vaidhyanathan 2011). If the digital companies start expending more resources pressuring Congress, that will provide a more pluralistic balance in the MPAA’s policy playground, but it doesn’t necessarily put power in the hands of the “Internet public.”

The fight over Internet censorship is far from over. What do these three levels of influence mean for the future of Internet politics? The way I see it, there are three potential outcomes:

I have to imagine that the readers of this essay likely prefer this third outcome. I do myself as well. But the point here is that we cannot expect any such movement to arise naturally. It requires work, and skill, and a bit of luck here and there. We cannot look to the anti-SOPA blackout as a monument, declaring victory and assuming that the open web now has its champion. Social movements are not that easy. Unless we are willing to settle for Hollywood’s Internet, or Hollywood-and-Google’s Internet, we have to treat this third outcome as a shared goal to work toward, rather than as a prediction or expectation.

Herbst, Susan. 1998.
Reading Public Opinion: How Political Actors View the Democratic Process
. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

Karpf, David. 2012.
The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy
. New York: Oxford University Press.

Parry, David. 2011. “It’s not the Public Internet, It is the Internet Public.” Blog post,
ProfoundHeterogeneity.com
:
http://profoundheterogeneity.com/2011/02/its-not-the-public-internet-it-is-the-internet-/files/05/68/30/f056830/public/

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. 2011.
The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry)
. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

The SOPA fight was a near perfect storm—a confluence of effects that will rarely, if ever, repeat.

Web platforms faced a near-existential threat: if SOPA had passed, many of those with a foreign presence would literally have had to shut down or alter their business models to such an extent that they would’ve been unrecognizable—and far less profitable. SOPA would have forced sites to police user-generated content before it was uploaded, fundamentally redefining the operations of sites similar to YouTube, Facebook, reddit, and even blogs that allow for comments from readers. Even many domestically-registered sites would have been impacted: search engines would’ve had to have scrubbed out links. Sites reliant on userposted content would’ve had to have policed links to any domains that had been blacklisted. And then they’d probably come directly for domestic sites next. It became easy for proprietors of platforms to justify participating in the blackout and other activism to themselves and to their boards and investors. It was a no-brainer: even if it meant distracting users with information about the bill or, more costly yet, steering them off-site so they could email Congress, it was still an astute business decision—that’s just how dangerous SOPA was.

What the SOPA activism didn’t do was create an algorithm that can be repeated for most other causes: Wikipedia won’t shut down to prevent war with Iran. Google won’t change its doodle to help protect Social Security. Tumblr—one of the truest heroes of this story—probably won’t generate eighty thousand phone calls to Congress out of concern about global warming.

Critically, even if platforms did take to activism around these non-Internet issues, activism would be substantially depressed compared to SOPA: everybody who uses the Internet cares about (or should care about) Internet freedom. Not everybody who uses the web cares about war, the social safety net, or the environment—and many of those who do are far from being in agreement. When Google prompted millions of its users to email Congress about an Internet censorship bill, Congress faced a tsunami of angry constituents; if Google asks users to email Congress about health care reform far fewer will participate and they’ll break 50-50ish and cancel each other out.

When there’s legislation in play that does threaten the operations of certain web platforms it makes sense to try to organize those sites. Demand Progress has had a modicum of success (though two or three orders of magnitude smaller than the SOPA effort) at spurring sites that sell used goods to inform their users about a key lawsuit that’s before the Supreme Court, whose ruling thereon is likely to kickstart a legislative fight this Congress. The court case is called Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons; its outcome could make it illegal to sell or resell things that
are manufactured abroad unless you have a specific license to do so. Antiquers, video game resale shops, and others participated in a day of action we organized in October. We hope sites like eBay and Craiglist will eventually mobilize their users, once the effort moves to the legislative phase. That would generate a huge outpouring of constituent contacts to Congress, but would almost necessarily be less substantial than the effort that took down SOPA: Internet freedom affects every website; the right to resell things impacts but a substantial minority of them.

SOPA-style activism is indeed probably a replicable response to other attempts to impede negative online liberties: legislation that bans broad swaths of users from posting and sharing content. But the magnitude of the SOPA victory has made lawmakers loathe to introduce legislation of that sort for the time-being. One Capitol Hill newspaper wrote an article about the prominence of a new meme echoing through the corridors of power in D.C.: fear of “getting SOPA’ed”.

The anti-SOPA coalition is not even replicable relative to all legislation that many of us—at least those on the left—would consider integral to a free and open Internet, as we’d see many of the more Right-leaning platforms and activists drop out of a grouping that sought government-enforced Net Neutrality regulations.

Last spring many of the activist organizations (from across the spectrum) that helped beat SOPA quickly pivoted to fight against cyber-security bills that would have undermined many basic online privacy rights: they’d essentially have broken down intra-governmental information silos, and also privacy-protecting walls between the government and corporations, allowing sensitive data about users to slosh around unimpeded, facilitating surveillance and even (potentially) being exploited for private profit. As of this writing we’ve managed to stymie this legislation—but without the help of the platforms that took to anti-SOPA activism, because the cyber-security bills either didn’t harm them, or actually helped them, by shifting certain liabilities away from those firms and onto the government.