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

  Blanket licenses are just one example of how we can craft regulations for the entertainment industry that value creation, investment, and innovation without criminalizing fans or attacking the Internet. The Internet era is not—and should not be—silent on the question: how do we ensure that creators and investors get a chance at money?

  That’s all copyright ever really wanted an answer to.

  On January 18, 2012 Boing Boing, the website co-edited by Cory Doctorow, blacked out its homepage. Visitors instead saw the message above.

  ON STRIKING THE ROOT

  LAWRENCE LESSIG

  Lawrence Lessig is the director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University, and a professor of law at Harvard Law School. For much of his academic career, Lessig has focused on law and technology, especially as it affects copyright. His current academic work addresses the question of “institutional corruption”—roughly, influences within an economy of influence that weaken the effectiveness of an institution, or weaken public trust.

  No one should doubt the significance of the SOPA/PIPA victory. A decade ago, it would have been literally unimaginable. Ten minutes before it was complete, it was still, to many on Capitol Hill, unimaginable. Yet a netroots movement succeeded in dislodging one of the most effective machines for lobbying on the Hill, through little more than the coordinated activity of millions of souls who depend upon the Net.

  Yet however important this victory was, its longterm significance will be lost unless we can learn something here. SOPA and PIPA are just symptoms of a much deeper pathology. And like aspirin with a fever, we delude ourselves if we ignore this underlying disease. The net could play a role in saving this democracy. But not if it rests with stopping stupid copyright legislation.

  D.C. is an insiders’ game. Those who work on that inside recognize an incredibly extensive economy of influence that in the end turns upon the ability of lobbyists to deliver results for their clients. Lobbyists can do that because they exploit an obvious dependence: Candidates for Congress need campaign cash. Lobbyists are a reliable channel for that cash—so long, at least, as the clients of these lobbyists get what they want.

  Everyone profits when that system works smoothly—except, of course, us. Lobbyists profit, because billings go up. Businesses and other wealthy interests profit, because crony capitalism pays. And Members and their staff profit, because campaigns get funded and Capitol Hill, as Congressman Jim Cooper puts it, remains a “farm league for K. Street.” The business model of government service is temporary governmental service—a temporary stop on the way to a lucrative career as a lobbyist. No one inside wants to threaten this money making machine. Too many just want to get out in time to cash in.

  Which leaves it to us, the outsiders, to force a fix for this system. We all must recognize first the particular addiction that Washington has evolved. That addiction is as old as government, though maybe never as profitable. It manifests itself in the drive to bend legislation to profit those who pay to play. It secures itself by making those who ostensibly have the most power—Members of Congress—the most dependent, indeed, fatally dependent upon those (in theory at least) with the least power—the lobbyists.

  Members are desperate to raise campaign funds. Lobbyists play a crucial role in channeling campaign funds. Like an addict and his supplier, this mutual dependency is practically impossible to fix. And especially when the body that suffers—our nation—remains removed from those trapped by this dependency. Unlike the drug addict, Congressmen don’t get the shakes. They don’t lose their appetite. They may work an insane life, but it is on a path to a comfortable life. They don’t pay for the harm this system imposes. We do.

  So we need a way to leverage the power SOPA made manifest to do something more than stop a stupid copyright bill. We must instead leverage that power to change the way power works in Washington. The reason the system works as lucratively (for them) as it does is that we have allowed the funding of campaigns to become incredibly concentrated.

  Candidates often spend the majority of their time raising money from the tiniest fraction of the 1%. Until we change that, the tiniest fraction of the 1% will continue to have the biggest chunk of our government’s power, and demand an endless list of 1%-enhancing reforms, with SOPA and PIPA possibly among the least significant.

  So how do we bring about this change?

  We need to force them to fund their campaigns differently. Congressmen will always be dependent upon their funders. That’s human nature. But we can change who their funders are. Rather than a tiny fraction of the 1%, we could create a system in which we all are the effective funders of political campaigns—whether a system of public funding, like most other mature democracies, or a system of “citizen funding,” where all citizens, but only citizens, contribute to the funding of campaigns.

  Imagine, for example, that every citizen had a $50 democracy voucher that she could give to any candidate who agreed to fund his or her campaign with vouchers plus contributions limited to $100. That system would produce an economy of influence radically different from the one we have today. Candidates would still need to work hard to raise money, but they would work hard pleasing the 99% and not just a tiny fraction of the 1%. There would be influence and power, but it would be spread among “the People.” There would still be dependency, but it would be, as Federalist 52 puts it, a “dependence upon the People alone.”

  Such a change could be made without changing the Constitution. Even this Supreme Court has affirmed the legitimacy of such a system for funding elections. Nothing in their Citizens United radicalism would render it vulnerable.

  But to bring about such a change would require us outsiders to do something we rarely do—speak, and act, in a cross-partisan way. The business model of organizing—and media, and political parties, and politicians—is polarization. Each side profits the more it convinces its own to hate the other side. We rally to our difference. We send money to those who express that difference best.

  Yet the striking fact about the SOPA/PIPA victory was that it was essentially cross-partisan. It was the Cato Institute as well as Demand Progress. It was net business as well as Wikipedia. There was no Left/Right valence to the fight against this Internet censorship. There was instead a brilliant campaign that succeeded in neutralizing those differences enough to allow all of us to focus on our common enemy.

  That in itself was an amazing victory. And if we learn anything from the SOPA/PIPA fight, we should learn how to do that again. Big fights must be exclusive fights: they must be important enough to unite us, and get us to ignore the much less important differences that divide us. Somehow we must learn to inspire that again.

  The current system is a cancer. There is nothing—save the death of this Republic—that will naturally stop it. It must instead be stopped by a movement of us: not politicians, but citizens, who accept the responsibility of every generation or so to turn away from private concerns, and take up a fundamental public challenge. The progressives did it a century ago. The abolitionists did it 60 years before that. And the framers of our constitution did it four score before them.

  Today is the Internet public’s moment: Web users joined together to defeat SOPA, buttressed by hundreds of online platforms which took to explicit activism for the first time because they faced an existential crisis. Now those same platforms must recognize that they face an ongoing threat: Concentrated, incumbent powers will continue to try to exert control over the Internet and its users unless we fundamentally reconstrue the incentives that define the behavior of lawmakers.

  To institute these reforms will surely demand an outcry far broader and louder than that which defeated SOPA—and that will require the active participation of the platforms that facilitated anti-SOPA activism: Imagine a blackout, in support of democracy vouchers and other good government reforms.

  Platform proprietors could mobilize their users to fight for these measures because it’s the right thing for socie
ty and will forestall future SOPAs, but better for them yet: Distributed, small dollar fundraising regimes would put those very platforms at the center of that new, more democratic, political dynamic, as the networks that the Internet utopians created would not only help save our republic by compelling government reform—they’d then become integral to the basic functioning of the new way. We’d see a broad subset of the public use Daily Kos, Red State, reddit and the social networks to decide which candidates to support with their vouchers and small dollar donations. And politicians would be loathe to ever again mess with the Internet if they understood that it had become the lifeblood via which the (newly righteous, democratically construed) campaign funds flowed.

  That is our challenge. Our government is corrupt. Deeply and fundamentally, even if openly and even legally. The challenge to end this corruption is as difficult as any, ever. The odds are equally as long. But if we love the ideals that this nation claims for itself, we have no choice but to do everything we can to restore it to those ideals. The freedom to create and innovate, no doubt. But also the freedom to govern ourselves. We may work for the 1%. But as for our government—no longer.

  CONCLUSION

  We’ve been deservedly hard on Facebook, in this book and in much of our work, but that company’s famed CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently wrote something that speaks to the spirit of the SOPA/PIPA fight, which we’ve in turn tried to capture in this book.

  Just as the world was abuzz with news that he was launching an initial public offering of stock in the company Zuckerberg drafted an explanation of the values that supposedly undergird Facebook’s management culture. His statement included a description of something he calls “The Hacker Way.” A few highlighted sentences:

  MARK ZUCKERBERG: The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

  The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it—often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo …

  Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works …

  Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win—not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

  Your editors agree with Zuckerberg’s take on hacking—and on hackers. The meaning and merits of hacking have been prominent in our minds in recent weeks, since the passing of Demand Progress’s Aaron Swartz. This tragedy has afforded us a rare chance to illuminate the contrast between white hat and black hat hackers. The former try to do right by humankind, or at least earn an honest living—and have built countless tools and companies that define the ways in which we now engage with computers and the Internet. The latter—a small minority—seek to exploit vulnerabilities out of malice or for personal gain. The law should distinguish between the two, but it doesn’t always. Nor does our culture at large: it was sad, but perhaps should not have been surprising, that at least one pledged contributor to Hacking Politics withdrew upon learning the name of the book. Let’s appropriate the appellation “hacker” for the good guys—and fix the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to make sure they’re no longer in harm’s way.

  It was the noblest elements of the hacker spirit that drove the defeat of SOPA/PIPA, even if most participants in the effort had never in their lives written a line of code. Activists from across the political spectrum worked in parallel—and sometimes in coordinated unison—to defeat legislation that was an affront to some of our most broadly shared values: the freedoms to gather and communicate with one another without restriction. We developed new memes, created new apps, started new organizations, and invented new tactics. We grew an ever more powerful movement by improving, building off of, and remixing one another’s ideas.

  We used the Internet to save the Internet, growing ever more formidable as we built off of one another’s ideas and work—in ways that precisely illuminate the folly that undergirds the sort of institutional consensus that could spawn the likes of SOPA to begin with. The surest evidence of the nefariousness of that legislation is the gloriousness of the work that millions of us undertook together to defeat it—and that much of that very work might have been made impossible had the bill passed, and if activists had abided by the scruples of the copyright maximalists and free speech skeptics who wrote it.

  The conditions that allowed for it—broad access to powerful technology; an Internet that’s integrated into the lives of a majority of Americans; a generalized, cross-ideological skepticism of the product of the institutional structures of American politics—are new, but they are growing and will stay with us for the foreseeable future. The SOPA/PIPA win was the first great American political hack of the Internet age, but it won’t be the last.

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