If someone bought a car and then complained that it wasn't taking care of all their transportation needs, but they never learned how to drive and didn't expect that they would have to do the work of driving, we would (rightly) say that they misunderstand what the car does; it's a tool and a force amplifier, but it still requires a lot of effort and attention.
Say what you will about the religious right and the tea party (and various mega-corporations), but they all understand that you have to drive the car that is our politicians. I feel like a whole lot of us aren't even showing up for our seat at the table - and there are a lot of us. (This is what I find so heartening about the threat of a Wikipedia black-out, too)
While I read about SOPA, and the way that the MPAA lobbies, the thing that keeps popping into my head is, why exactly are those of us who love a free internet on the defensive on these issues? Why do we always end up being reactive? Why are we vaguely relieved when some people start making a bill that's only 1/10th as bad as SOPA / Protect IP? Why aren't we (or wikipedia, or tumblr, or google, or the whole fuzzy mess of everyone who so identities) driving for more proactive legislation that makes the internet even more free and even better protected? Why are we voluntarily relinquishing initiative here? Why aren't we actively engaging in our own lobbying to neuter fundamentally anti-Enlightenment viruses like the MPAA more generally, to cut them off at the knees?
Thank god for the EFF, but there has to be some way to mobilize broader-based support for a lot of these values in a more sustained and pointed way.
I think you answered your own question in the last paragraph.
For companies like the RIAA and MPAA they have business interests that are closely tied into the laws that they're forced to recognize. Because of this they create positions within their company whose job is to ensure the laws are aligned with their needs.
As individuals (even with like-minded goals) we don't have this luxury. We work our day jobs that may or may not relate to the internet directly and then come home to let loose or attend to other needs outside the job. In no part of this cycle is there a massive budget that allows us to pick the brain of those in power during the week. We don't have time to help draft Bills and gain support through our government and in a way, expect others to do that for us.
Who are these people we want? Well other companies of course. We want Google and Yahoo to step up to bat, but we're met full circle with the problem in the first place. They'll lobby government to align the laws with their business direction. And as individuals its up to us to decide if their business direction aligns with our interests.
What is left then? Let the corporations bicker and fight it out but once the bill gets tossed into parliament let our representatives know how we feel about it as the people.
Sucky system but I don't see a better solution right now.
I don't have answers about any of this; really, I just having growing questions.
I don't disagree with you. Particularly with 2-income professional families (or ambitious younger people in challenging jobs like startups), there clearly is very little emotional and mental energy to spare for this level on non-voting, day-in/day-out political engagement.
But with that said, I have in my own extended family seen the extent to which conservative churches often play aggressively political roles in organizing and putting lots of political pressure on politicians. As busy as we all feel, somehow they still often manage to find the boots on the ground for this kind of stuff.
I hate to get all Oprah / the Secret on this topic, but I'm inching towards thinking that this entire topic is about confidence, primarily. Most us of in internet land seem to have a certain exasperated resignation that things can't get better, only worse. It seems like a deep seated belief. It's hard to find the energy to fight when you assume you're fighting a lost cause, regardless of how worthwhile. I'm not sure how much of that is self-fulfilling - maybe no one can.
By my understanding of things, in the 50's, the civil rights movement was extremely tactical about where they choose to have boycotts and protests, actively targeting certain Southern communities and leaders that they knew would be particularly aggressive and, thus, particularly effective at mobilizing public moral sentiment to the movement's cause.
I'm not going to claim that what we're discussing here is on par with that, but was it sad that they had to game the system to effect change? Were they gaming the system? Or were they just confronting the reality of our politics and using that reality as a force for moral good in the world? Is that gaming, or is that grabbing reality firmly with both hands? I'm not being rhetorical here; I'm actually kind of wrestling with this myself.
I HATE politics. I have no stomach for it. But it does seem to me that it can't be escaped, that it is ultimately all there is, and that good peoples' resistant idealism often lets some pretty lousy people do whatever they want with, short term, nearly no consequences (and probably long term with a lot of massively destabilizing consequences that aren't really good for anyone).
>While I read about SOPA, and the way that the MPAA lobbies, the thing that keeps popping into my head is, why exactly are those of us who love a free internet on the defensive on these issues? Why do we always end up being reactive? Why are we vaguely relieved when some people start making a bill that's only 1/10th as bad as SOPA / Protect IP? Why aren't we (or wikipedia, or tumblr, or google, or the whole fuzzy mess of everyone who so identities) driving for more proactive legislation that makes the internet even more free and even better protected?
Is this a question in honest good faith? Because I don't have a million dollars to buy, I mean bribe, I mean influence votes in the House and Senate? Further, these companies are on the defensive because they're being attacked. I would imagine Google would happily keep the status quo. They have no need to petition the government for "proactive" measures because everything is smooth sailing and not everyone wants to legislate every last detail to protect our freedoms. So instead, we're forced to react, and it's hard to do when you're combating people with huge war chests.
The progressive era followed the era of robber barons. There was even more wealth asymmetry in America then than now. Something happened to make that transition take place, something cultural, something that the abstraction called dollars couldn't sufficiently buy and sway. Concentrated money can't be the only determining factor in how change happens, or at least not in a sustained fashion. It's just one more leaky abstraction about legitimacy that breaks down from time to time when abused too far.
Occupy Wallstreet (and the we are the 99 percent tumbler) has been responded to as a wildly outsized threat in the political discourse of establishment pundits that I follow, almost an existential threat. I guess I'm writing through all this to try to understand why they're so shaken by it - clearly, it's not like those dirty hippies and their bongos have giant war chests, either.
The thing that makes the concentrated wealth in America so damn powerful, I'm increasingly convinced, far more than the pragmatic reach of the money, is the confidence of its holders in the moral rightness of the general order, their outsized belief in the narratives they tell themselves - and the complacency of the rest of us in going along with those stories.
Money matters, in some eras much more than others. (Again, this is why I find the idea of Wikipedia going, essentially, on strike, so massively fascinating. How much money does Wikipedia have, and how much profit? And yet how much cultural and moral influence does it have?) Maybe the frustration and sense of helplessness that you're writing here, that so many of us write here, is exactly the thing that eventually whittles away the confidence up above, the thing that makes attacking the corruption possible?
Or maybe not. But I'm toying with the idea of trying on just a bit of hope for tactical reasons after stewing in an awful lot of cynicism for quite a while.
The problem is that people vote politicians in based on abstract esoteric social issues, instead of their stance on real-world issues that actually matter.
Eh, while I do think there's a lot of cultural-identity politics that goes on (especially over religion), I think plenty of people from both the left and right focus on issues that are "real-world", even if it's disproportionately a lightning-rod subset of the issues. For example, people who hate taxes seem partly driven by ideology, but partly just by a desire to pay lower taxes. And people who oppose restrictions on abortion are often driven by a practical desire to have abortion clinics available in the real world as an option.
People vote based on bikeshed issues. Absolutely everyone has an opinion on gay marriage even it affects about 50,000 gay people who want to get married nationwide. However, people are bored to death by and largely ignore financial and patent reform even though it directly affects the future of almost everyone in the country.
People voting based on stances on real world issues is actually the problem. If you vote on any issue other than fixing the broken system, you're contributing to the problem.
In a lot of ways the social issues matter, but they are obscured by the shear complication of the law making process and the lack of accountability the media brings to the process. We hear pundits and politician speeches, but we never hear about the lobbyist, sponsors, co-sponsors who contributed to a bill. The news doesn't do us the service that a sports channel does by keeping score.
Actually, I think part of the problem is that people elect their politicians based on real-world issues and how they think a certain candidate will act/vote. This system allows the snakes that will say anything just for a vote to make it in politics, but fails to actually elect people who are capable of making the best decisions for their constituents and being a leader.
(me: https://twitter.com/#!/ericjgruber/status/147004394448224256)