Don’t let the crazy title fool you. I am only calling this “Unncessary Thoughts” because I am going to blog about the rise and fall of the evil SOPA/PIPA bills in the USA, and I am fairly unlikely to say anything that a million other bloggers will not also say on this historic day.
In other words, I am doing that compulsively self-effacing thing.
Public auto-flagellation aside, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that today, Wednesday the 18th of January, 2012, will be a day that goes down in history as a pivotal day in the growing populist strength of the Internet, and the rise of the global citizen.
Because today is the day that the Internet rose as one, and said “NO. “
It said no to the virtually identical piece of evil legislation known as SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (the Protect Intellectual Property Act).
Both of them would have granted the United States government broad, wide-reaching powers to block or take down any website that their corporate masters deem to be supporting online piracy or intellectual property theft.
And this was not just a problem for the USA. Either of those bills would have applied to many Canadian websites too, because the legislation treated all addresses registered with ANIC, the American web registrar, as the same, and that means all .com addresses would be considered to be American for the purposes of the law.
Websites like, say, this one for example.
Clearly, this legislation was a complete corporate fantasy concocted by the same sort of minds who think that if you fast-forward through the commercials, you are stealing television. The kind of people who wish your DVDs only worked once and then you had to pay another fee.
The kind of people who, if you let them, would erase every mp3 in your collection.
Hell, they would erase songs from your memory if they could.
But the Internet community was having none of that. Momentum has been building against these evil twins of legislation born straight out of corporate Hell (the politicians have all admitted that they didn’t even read the bill before saying they supported it, which kind of makes you wonder who wrote it for them, doesn’t it? Or does it?) for at least a month, and today it came to a glorious head when dozens of websites “went dark”, installing scripts that let you see their content for just a split second before the screen blacked out and a message told you why they went dark, and why you should support them.
And as protests go, it will go down in history as one of the most profound of this era. Nothing says “pay attention to this” like depriving millions of people of their Reddit, Wikipedia, and Wired. Even the apolitical and apathetic had to take notice.
And what makes this a great day in history, and not just an historic one, is that it’s working.
Support for the evil twins is folding. Legislators who, before today, were on record as supporting these two corporate nightmares are withdrawing their support, and they are doing it in droves.
Finally, there has come a moment when a major country’s legislators are hearing the voices of the people they purport to represent over the voices of the corporations who pay their rent.
Finally, the politicians are reminded that this is still a democratic world, and that if pushed far enough, their constituents will push back, and push hard.
This is what the Internet looks like when it is angry.
And this is the result.
And it is truly a beautiful thing.
It restores just a small but vital bit of my faith that democracy can work, the people do still have a voice, and evil can be stopped if the people band together as one to fight it.
When last year’s Occupy Movement began to abate, I asked myself “What’s next?”
All the anger and outrage does not simply go away just because the forces that be stomped out the first embers of the growing fire.
It simply goes underground, growing in strength and conviction, and nobody can predict where it will spring up again.
In the heavily saturated liquid that is the Internet, no science can predict exactly which memetic fragment will form the nucleus of the next vast crystallization.
Occupy came out of seemingly nowhere. Just someone with a good idea that, due to the speed and efficiency of the Internet, caught on so fast and spread so far that it dominated the news cycle for months in a row.
That’s a huge achievement in this short attention span, twenty-four hour news cycle world.
And now, we have this, the noblest and most inspiring Black Day in all of history.
Because today is the day that by going black, the Internet shed a great deal of light about the power of the people versus the power of the people in charge.
It took a hell of a lot of us shouting as one united voice in order to be heard over the influence of money, lobbyists, lifestyle, and the Capital City effect. But it can still be done.
I sincerely hope that all the corporate sharks who were so sure they could slip this money grubbing, rights abusing, corporatist legislation into the law books without anyone noticing (after all, they have done it before) are now scrambling like mad, trying to figure out how they lost this one while their billionaire bosses demand heads on plates for their failure to subvert democracy as ordered.
Hopefully, these sharks will find the people harder and harder to fool as citizen rage increases and the means to express that rage remain in the hands of people and proves impossible for the powers that be to control at all.
The Internet might not always be pretty, but it’s the last best hope for democracy in the world.
And today, it raised its mighty voice, and said “NO.”