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

by David Segal, Patrick Ruffini

  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.

  Works Cited

  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-public/

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

  THAT WAS AMAZING. CAN WE DO IT AGAIN SOMETIME?

  DAVID SEGAL

  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.

  There’s another structural respect in which the SOPA effort was unusual. There were two distinct power nodes/monetary centers of gravity lined up on opposing sides of the legislation: Big Content (Hollywood, the recording industry, and the like) on one hand and Silicon Valley on the other. Many politicians—especially Democrats, but a few powerful Republicans like Lamar Smith—have traditionally been caught in Hollywood’s gravitational field. Silicon Valley, because it’s younger and—for better or worse—has had a cultural antipathy towards engaging with Washington, D.C., claimed hooks in fewer politicians at the outset of the SOPA fight. But what it did have was the potential, and eventually concrete, support of something like 99% of the rank-and-file Americans who would come to pay attention to the issue. Hollywood is always whining about its diminishing profits (which strikes me as a questionable lobbying strategy in our money-obsessed political system); meanwhile Silicon Valley is an ascendant power center that demonstrated a newfound willingness to engage in lobbying and politicking over the course of the SOPA effort.

  At a risk of mixing metaphors: if one were a free radical in this scenario—as most Republicans were—it’s not a hard political calculus to determine which node to associate with: zip as fast as possible towards the one that has a lot of money, is still on the rise, and has the esteem of 99% of the voters. Uncommitted Republicans lined up against SOPA—even nutty Michele Bachmann issued an important, early, oppositional statement—and several Republican sponsors withdrew their support; key Democrats continued to back the legislation out of fear of alienating their traditional allies in Hollywood, or out of genuine allegiance to the bill’s philosophical underpinnings.

  Today the Republicans are making a play to become the Party of Silicon Valley, with Congressman Darrell Issa helming the charge. A sub-caucus of the GOP called the Republican Study Committee recently went so far as to issue a scathing report about the impact of maximalist copyright enforcement on the American economy. (Though backlash from Big Content spooked them into withdrawing the paper, and it
s author has since been terminated.)

  SOPA was an earthquake, revealing new fault lines that will remain on the map for some time to come, and compelling a shelf to fall off of the traditional copyright maximalist consensus: we’re not likely to see another abrupt shift of that magnitude anytime soon, but we’re tending towards a new equilibrium in that political space wherein considerations about Internet freedom and intellectual property rights abut one another.

  Yet there are indeed some respects in which lessons learned during the SOPA effort can be applied to other organizing.

  Many of the tools and mini-campaigns that activists built during the fight can be used in support of other causes or inspire new tactics. The game-ification of activism was incredibly useful: the self-censor tool that FFTF developed, the commitment from Wyden to read names on the floor of the Senate, and other tools and actions increased the impetus for people to contact Congress. They imbued the rote “clicktivism” with an extra increment of meaning—and they were fun—making it more likely that people would take part and encourage others to do the same. There was also something important happening on the back-end of those constituent contacts that’s a bit esoteric, but worth mentioning: Demand Progress (namely, Aaron Swartz) built a tool which we shared with Fight for the Future that generated actual emails to Congress each time somebody signed up on one of our petition or email pages. Many activist organizations simply deliver PDFs with lists of names to Capitol Hill offices (frequently with email addresses and complete street addresses scrubbed out). Sending discrete emails carries more weight, as each individual note compels the office to work a bit harder, forcing staffers to log the contact and draft and send a response, thereby imparting a deeper sense that the emailer is a real, live constituent. I’ve spoken with dozens of lawmakers and staffers at all levels of governance, and they adhere to this point without exception. So it may seem wonky, but I regularly evangelize on this point.

  The ideological left and the right came together to win this fight, and that sort of cross-partisan coalition is likely to form with increasing frequency: power structures in Washington have become so stagnant and corrupt that the relevant political divide is less and less so that between the two major parties—whose leaders are fairly consistent advocates for bailouts for the wealthy, perpetual warfare, diminished civil liberties—but between those who have institutional power and all of the rest of us.

  There are sharp, important, ideological divides about the role of the state in the economy, the need for a social safety net, and the like. But there are important points of solidarity that should not be obscured by party stripe or reductionist ideological labels: nobody likes corporate welfare (as the left would call it) or rent-seeking (as it’s named by the right) unless one is among those insiders directly benefitting from said largess. The left and right came together to fight against the bank bailouts and to audit the Federal Reserve. There’s a substantial antiwar, pro-civil liberties flank that identifies as conservative/libertarian. There’s solidarity in support of ending the war on drugs and instituting other criminal justice reforms.

  And to some extent, the left and right can fight side-by-side in service of that ultimate goal of devising an election funding structure that makes politicians accountable to voters and not to the interests of wealthy campaign financiers. It shocks many of my allies on the left who’ve proved easy prey to propaganda about the right, but polls consistently show that upwards of two-thirds of Republicans agree that the system of private money that we use fund elections has a corrupting influence on politics, and want to reduce its import and impact. Institutional heavyweights serve as their gatekeepers. Reformers must devise an end run around them and conspire with the conservative rank-and-file.

  With that we arrive at my ultimate hope, explicated in more detail in Lawrence Lessig’s excellent contribution towards the end of this book: that the platforms that helped kill SOPA will, out of an enlightened self-interest or a noblesse oblige (that’s hopefully concomitant with their newfound political power), facilitate activism towards the end of implementing a bottom-up, networked, democratic system of financing elections and thereby help us reclaim a republic wherein lawmakers are accountable to the electorate rather than concentrated private capital. There are tremendous differences between the Left and Right, but let’s agree that we should get to duke them out on a level playing field—rather than one whereon the corporatists have the high ground on all of the rest of us.

  PART 5

  WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

  In this chapter, several authors pick up on themes that are threaded throughout this book, and suggest directions in which we might steer the energy and redeploy some of the tools and tactics that made the defeats of SOPA and PIPA possible. Congressman Ron Paul speaks to the importance of Internet freedom for libertarians; Erin McKeown issues a call-to-arms to artists; Brad Burnham writes on the importance to innovate, from the perspective of a venture capitialist; Marvin Ammori writes of changing understandings of free speech rights as the public sphere relies ever more heavily on privately-owned online platforms; Cory Doctorow offers one (of many) potential paths forward for copyright reform; Lawrence Lessig urges those who were active in the SOPA/PIPA fight to muster once more, to tackle the sorts of institutional corruption that allowed those bills to progress as far as they did.

  THE BATTLE FOR INTERNET FREE DOMISC RITICAL FOR THE LIBERTY MOVEMENT

  RON PAUL

  Former Congressman Ron Paul of Texas enjoys a national reputation as a premier advocate for liberty in politics. Dr. Paul was and is a leading spokesman in Washington for limited constitutional government, low taxes, free markets, and a return to sound monetary policies based on commodity-backed currency. He is known among both his colleagues in Congress and his constituents for his consistent voting record in the House of Representatives: Paul never voted for legislation unless he determined the proposed measure was expressly authorized by the Constitution. In the words of former Treasury Secretary William Simon, Paul was the “one exception to the Gang of 535” on Capitol Hill.

  The liberty movement has undergone tremendous growth over the last few years, aided in large part by the Internet revolution. Today, thanks to the Internet, it is easier than ever before for liberty activists to spread news and other information regarding the evils of government power and the benefits of freedom. For the first time in human history, supporters of liberty around the world can share information across borders quickly and cheaply. Without the filter of government censors, this information emboldens millions to question governments and promote liberty.

  In America, websites like the Drudge Report and LewRockwell.com have broken the mainstream media’s de facto monopoly on news and information, enabling the widespread dissemination of stories concerning government malfeasance. Before the Internet revolution, many of these stories would have been untold by state-loving, establishment reporters eager to protect their access to power. The Internet also has made it possible for websites like Mises.org to spread knowledge of the freedom philosophy across the globe. Until the late 1990s, individuals interested in Austrian economics, U.S. constitutional history, and libertarian philosophy had to spend hours scouring used book stores or the back pages of obscure libertarian periodicals to find the great works of Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, and other giants of liberty. Local libraries and universities ignored libertarian politics and economics.

  Today, however, the greatest classics of libertarian thought, libertarian philosophy, and libertarian economics are available instantly to anyone with Internet access.

  The Internet also has enabled individuals in the liberty movement to increase their political effectiveness and thus have a major impact on American politics. My 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns are the most obvious example of how liberty activists use the Internet to spread the message of liberty. Many of my supporters first heard about my campaign via YouTube or other online videos of my speeches and campaign events.

  These c
onverts quickly began sharing information with others. They also used the Internet to coordinate activities and events organically, without any centralized coordination with my official campaign. This radical, decentralized, organic support for my campaigns—with the Internet serving as the primary organizing tool—was an incredible demonstration of true “grassroots” organizing. This army of mostly young, Internet savvy activists is what enabled my campaigns to overcome the deeply biased mainstream media’s virtual blackout, allowing my campaign to outperform several better-funded candidates.

  Perhaps the signature issue of my political career has been exposing the ways in which the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank enables the growth of the warfare-welfare state and erodes the American people’s standard of living. For years, our efforts to inform the American public about the Fed’s unchecked power were blocked by self-appointed academic and media gatekeepers, who considered criticism of the Fed outside the bounds of acceptable discourse. Thanks to the Internet revolution, however, these gatekeepers have lost their power to relegate issues like monetary policy to the margins of political discussion. As a result, the Federal Reserve has become a major political issue for the first time in American history.