Wednesday, January 18, 2012 is the day of the SOPA/PIPA Blackout. (Stop Online Piracy Act, and Protect IP Act)
On Wednesday, many websites, some of them central to an average user's typical day of relaxing and surfing the internet will potentially show the US Government that it is a force to be reckoned with. They plan to do this by going dark, and redirecting people to information about why SOPA sucks, and instructions on how to contact your congressmen.
I am excited to see what all websites actually follow through with it, and which ones might unexpectedly join in.
Imagine the reaction of the unaware mainstream masses if Facebook, eBay, Pay-Pal, Amazon, Yahoo, Mozilla, LinkedIn, Twitter, AOL, Zynga, and GOOGLE, joined in with already on board Wikipedia and Reddit (and countless other littler sites) as they go dark on Wednesday in protest. The sites I listed above are all sites that have already formally expressed their opposition to SOPA. Will they take a loss in revenue for 12 hours to fight for the future? Will they risk the potential backlash of the theoretical sloth/lemming masses who just want to buy crap and jerk off on their precious internet, and don't give a crap about the rights of groups like Wiki-leaks and Anonymous, because my guess is that when/if Fox News HAS to report about the blackout, those names could be bandied about.
I am excited to see what kind of fall out there will be. I am interested to discover if people will simply indignantly slough it off as an irritation for a day, or if they will actually take notice of what SOPA means for the internet. What it means for... GASP - YouTube!? That it means you could literally go to jail for posting to Facebook some funny/cool/stupid video/picture/story you found somewhere.
I am also excited to see what happens when the mainstream media is forced to talk about it. If they will. It will be very interesting from a political science/sociology level.
Piracy is going to happen. The piracy of movies, music, and games is horrible, and I would love to see something be done about it. As someone who makes a living doing work that is in the group of things being pirated, I really really do hate it. But giving the government the power to shut down an entire website because of one link. These bills lay the groundwork for the power to control the masses by censoring and limiting information. If the groundwork is created, it will only be a matter of time before loopholes in the bureaucracy are used to abuse the system.
There was a t-shirt catalog that I used to read when I was a kid. It was this amazing encapsulation of liberalism. Intellectual humor, political movements, women's rights, civil rights, and I loved it. There was a list of slogans that you could buy as a bumper sticker or a button. It was 2 pages long, single spaced, 2 columns each page, in a super tiny font. It was fascinating.
I took special note of the slogans that were available as buttons, bumper stickers, t-shirts and posters. The slogans that made it to the posters section were the special ones. The posters were the ones that were the most expensive, only the subjects that brought in the most sales would justify being made into posters. These were the truisms of their customer demographic.
One of those posters had this amazingly intense poem/statement on it. It is one of those ground shaking revelation types of things. I used to look at it and think, wow... imagine being in that position. Where this poem isn't some sort of waxing philosophic romantic type of thing. No. This poem was about life and death. Literally. Historically. This shit happened.
Now, this poem does not directly relate to the issues being raised by SOPA. But, if the poem was maybe another 50 lines longer, and traced the history of its lineage farther back... something along the lines of SOPA could very well be near the beginning. Or, I am delusional, and trying to act smart.
First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak out because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
- Martin Niemöller
On Wednesday, I wonder if we could be seeing an opening salvo to the "Mayan Prophecy of 2012!" Which some have suggested is not really so much the apocalypse as it is a sociological sea change.
FUN!
EXCITING!
INTERESTING!
First of all, I did contact all 3 of my representatives. Secondly, your quote reminded me of this quote:
ReplyDelete"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
And C)You are blogging about serious, cerebral shit (which I expect from you, at least sometimes) which impresses the hell out of me. Makes me feel like a grown-up to be reading, so thanks for that.
Yes...
ReplyDeleteSerious Cerebral Maturity® has always been one of my most defining strengths.