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

  Once again, we forwarded line-by-line documentation about the potential impacts of Klobuchar’s proposal, but this time Charter Media never even bothered responding. When I pushed Nicole for information about what was going on and how long ad approval would take, she acknowledged the unusual circumstances we were facing: “That is a really good question. I haven’t had to do this yet this year …” It was late October. The corporate backers of PIPA and Ten Strikes had decided to play hardball and were now doubling down on their ongoing media embargo by not only refusing to report on the legislation, but by actively censoring our political speech.

  Some local affiliates had run stories on the Bieber-Klobuchar spat, but there was an ongoing, impenetrable national blackout on network coverage of this affair, the streaming bill in general, PIPA, and COICA before it. It would continue until well after SOPA was introduced. In fact, the hosts and producers of various programs made it known to us that they feared that they’d face professional repercussions for airing any criticism of the legislation.

  We ended up spending our ad budget by targeting the Klobuchar ad at Minnesota YouTube viewers. The episode was a perfectly-packaged microcosm of what we worried we’d face at a much broader scale if bills like these were to pass, or if Net Neutrality is undermined: the conglomerates that run the media very much want to constrain their viewers from accessing information that might be used to the detriment of corporate interests.

  In spite of the various impediments, Klobuchar and many Minnesotans were now well aware of our concerns, and we learned that we had unwittingly generated some collateral damage: Klobuchar’s apparently (and completely understandably) mortified teenage daughter. And let that be a lesson to any Fortunate Sons and Daughters who might happen to read these pages: the rest of us rely on you guys to make sure your parents know what the Internet is, and to provide a check on their proclivities to let power go to their heads.

  There’s perhaps no better way to know that you’re being effective than when you’re taken seriously by your antagonists. A friend later related this ( araphrased) vignette about a Klobuchar fundraiser that fall: the question-and-answer session at the $500-per-head happening was winding down when a man raised his hand and opened his query with a cheeky “Senator, I just have to ask your opinion on a matter of utmost import.”

  She answered, “Well, let me guess—does it have anything to do with a certain Canadian pop idol?”

  “Well, no—I have no idea what you’re talking about. I was going to ask if you agree with Republicans who think pizza should be considered a vegetable for school lunch purposes.”

  But the damage was done, and now she had to address the mop-topped elephant in the room. And she did so by launching into an ad hominem attack against Demand Progress (even though FFTF deserved the credit for enticing Bieber into the fray).

  CLASHES WITH THE BIG GUNS

  DAVID M00N

  The SOPA/PIPA fight became personal at various points in the legislative process. Industry groups accused Demand Progress of being in league with “rogue websites” or under the control of companies like Google. Demand Progress’ David Moon (left) later crashed a Copyright Alliance party on May 17, 2011. The event was held at Microsoft’s Washington office, and featured pop-in’s from SOPA Sponsors Rep. Lamar Smith (right) and Rep. Judy Chu. The fundraising auction at the event featured items from NewsCorp and the RIAA.

  As we meandered through the awkward process of helping to string together an anti-PIPA coalition, we found comfort, and even great pleasure, in a number of public skirmishes we had with the bill’s major proponents: The Motion Picture Association of America and the Chamber of Commerce.

  This blog post was one of Hollywood’s many attempts to discredit anti-SOPA/PIPA activism.

  First, the MPAA accused Demand Progress of an inappropriate alliance with file sharing sites. On a May 24, 2011 blog post, the MPAA wrote: “in its latest campaign to generate attention, demandprogress appears to have allied itself with at least one—and who knows how many more—offshore rogue websites that promote the theft and illegal marketing of American products like movies, video games and software.” Never mind that their only proof of an “alliance” was that a link to our website was posted on the popular file sharing site Demonoid. The Techdirt blog pointed out how ridiculous the MPAA’s charges were: “[Demand Progress] has been doing a bang up job trying to point out problems with the PROTECT IP Act, and apparently the lovely folks over at the MPAA finally noticed, and decided that rather than respond with facts, it was instead going to smear the well respected organization in a blog post (which, of course, you can’t comment on, because the MPAA knows that very few people actually support its stance).”

  We took this as further evidence that we were actually having an impact. We were a small, underfunded, brand new shop that was regularly told that we were taking on the Sisyphean task of fighting a bill that was certain to pass. Very often, that felt like an accurate assessment of our predicament, but we saw these attacks as demonstrations that our opponents weren’t so certain. Why else would they be taking swipes like these at the likes of us?

  The sensational reactions to our work continued unabated. On October 28, 2011, an intellectual property attorney from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce posted an unusually screechy blog article criticizing us for characterizing SOPA as an Internet blacklist bill, as we had with PIPA and COICA before it. In his tirade against Demand Progress, Steve Tepp wrote:

  Well, it looks like Halloween came a few days early for the anti-IP crowd this year … First up is Demand Progress. Before they even saw the House bill, they started calling it the “New Internet Blacklist Bill.” Blacklist? That sounds pretty bad. But before we get carried away, let’s take a look at the actual language of the actual legislation. Can YOU find a blacklist? No? Can you find a list of ANY kind? No?

  Oooh, oooh, wait. There’s a study! … Wow. So, the only thing Demand Progress can hang its hat on is a study and a report to Congress … Undeterred by the facts, Demand Progress continues to try to scare people with this rhetoric.

  This was posted on a blog belonging to the Chamber of Commerce, the big business behemoth, the face of corporate America—and it was completely unhinged. It raised a few eyebrows, and one journalist sought a reaction from us, noting that the full-throttle attack “seems a bit unlike what they usually do.” But with each wild swing in our direction we saw further evidence that our action campaigns were making the backers of SOPA/PIPA at least a little bit nervous. And thus we pressed on …

  We didn’t realize this phenomenon had a name until reading the recent book, Bailout, by Neil Barofsky, who was the inspector general of the Toxic Assets Relief Program (TARP), or what most of us know as the bank bailout. It’s generally understood in political circles that it is folly to “punch down”: you don’t attack somebody who’s lower than you on the totem pole, or it gives your antagonist a chance to drag you down to their level and advance their cause.

  And drag them down we did, gleefully using these attacks to excite our members and grow our organization. The Chamber of Commerce’s maniacal post became fodder for a fundraising appeal to our membership, and raised several thousand dollars. A few months after it launched, Creative America—an AstroTurf (faux grassroots) group that was funded by the major Hollywood studios—announced that it had achieved a membership of ten thousand PIPA supporters. We pushed our list to help us recruit ten thousand new PIPA opponents (deemed such once they’d emailed the Senate against the bill) in 24 hours. It took 72.

  Buyer’s remorse: These screenshots capture a few comments of those who signed a petition in support of Creative America on the Change.org website - and later realized they’d been tricked into backing a corporate front group’s effort to censor the Internet.

  Along the way we struggled to peel labor organizations away from the SOPA/PIPA sponsors’ spin about the issue. But on the ground, union members working in creative industries often sympathized with the fight to keep
the Internet open. This Screen Actors Guild member notes his opposition to SOPA at the Jan. 18, 2012 NY Tech Emergency Meetup.

  LABOR SIDES WITH THE BOSSES

  DAVID SEGAL

  As I’ve set about editing this book I’ve noticed that several essays espouse—or at least seem situated upon a background of—the libertarian economic tendencies that comport with the leanings of many people in the tech community. Let me try to add some balance.

  I ran for city council in 2002 spurred in large part by a living wage organizing campaign in Providence, led by labor vanguard groups like Rhode Island Jobs with Justice and unions like the Service Employees International Union and the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union. We were striving to enact legislation that would guarantee that full-time employees for the city and major city contractors earn at least $10.19 per hour—not much to ask for in high-cost New England. Our efforts to pass the ordinance fell just short—our mayor flipped his position on the issue and brought a key councilmember with him—but several bargaining units that would have benefited from the law organized into unions and achieved wages at that level or higher through collective bargaining, and many of the activists who cut their teeth in that effort still serve as the heart of Providence’s progressive activist community. Over the course of my near-decade in politics I racked up a 100% voting record as per the various unions’ legislative scorecards, was endorsed by several major unions for my Congressional run in 2010, and regularly wore a Jobs with Justice hooded sweatshirt on the floor of the House of Reps. (I was pretty poor—we made about $14,000 to serve in the Assembly—and there’s a certain power of notoriety that follows from underdressing.)

  As I closed out my tenure as a state rep in late 2010, it was thus terribly awkward to find that I was now lined up against much of organized labor, as unions stood with Hollywood and other business interests as they opposed the efforts of millions of Americans—including myriad union members—to defend the open Internet.

  Silicon Valley tends to hold quite liberal positions on matters of social policy, to which I absolutely adhere: support for gay rights, drug policy and broader criminal justice reform, less militarism, and the like. But a substantial sub-portion of tech tends towards an anarcho-capitalist economic vision whereby an optimal society is one in which perfectly networked people-points engage in frictionless commerce, with very low taxes and a minimal social safety net, and in which unions—were they ever useful—are endemic to the ossified industrial structures that governed the Old Economy, and whose agitation unduly protects incumbents and generates economic inefficiencies. This is, in fact, much of the essence of the so-called California Ideology, an influential strain of Cyber Utopianism. (For a detailed historiography of these tendencies, watch any—ideally all—of Adam Curtis’s wonderful films, especially All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.)

  I am not a Cyber Utopian. I think the Internet is critically important and has, and will continue to, improve peoples’ lives the world round—but only so long as we fight to make sure it remains a force for the democratization of society, rather than a tool that the already-powerful can use to entrench themselves. The Internet can create efficiencies and reduce costs, but it doesn’t inherently serve to reduce inequalities or otherwise create a more economically just society.

  Government intervention in the economy is imperative to its functioning in any remotely humane fashion. Organized labor is as needed as ever, its atrophy over recent decades coinciding with, and helping stir, a vicious cycle that’s led to vast wealth inequality. Just a small percentage of the last 40 years’ worth of productivity gains have accrued to the average worker, with real-dollar median wages growing by about 20% while real GDP has doubled. The so-called economic recovery in whose midst we still struggle, four years on from the collapse, has skewed wealth distribution even further towards the already wealthy: the rich have scrabbled back to where they stood pre-recession far faster than the rest of us. This is, in part, a direct consequence of the labor movement’s too-limited influence over governmental decisions and boss-employee power dynamics: labor’s weakened bargaining position within the workplace has made it easier for management to keep the bulk of profits for themselves, reducing employees’ quality of life, and meaning that there’s less money in the hands of people who are actually likely to spend it in the real economy.

  Labor’s diminished power over political actors is much of why the government’s reaction to the economic crisis has been so pathetic. Deficit spending that’s too little to replace lost demand—and insufficient to compel banks and the wealthy to recommence lending—has enabled a collapse in government revenues, which has, in turn, led to the elimination of public employees’ jobs, remaining workers’ income growth stalling out, and waves of panic over pension liabilities that wouldn’t be a substantial burden under more sane national-level economic leadership. Now even Social Security and Medicare look likely to fall beneath lawmakers’ axes.

  Even were we all, indeed, the rational, omniscient, self-interested atoms posited by the California Ideology, it’s clear that many economic problems would best be solved through collective action. Two illustrations that I hope might appeal to my data-driven friends in Silicon Valley and Alley follow.

  First of all: there’s an essential game theory problem that helps sustain the decrepit state of our economy—it can be illuminated by that most canonical game theory thought experiment, in fact: in the Prisoners’ Dilemma, two partners in crime are hauled into jail and separated for questioning. If one snitches and the other doesn’t, the rat walks and the one who stays quiet goes to jail for ten years; if each gives up the other, they both go to jail for three years; if neither talks, they both go free. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma the rational decision, yielding the best-expected outcome for each criminal, has the pair ratting one another out, and taking the middling sentences. It’s a tragic (for the criminals) function of the inability to engage in collective action, as in a world in which the duo could communicate with and trust one another they’d both keep their lips sealed and neither would go to prison at all.

  Lack of confidence that investments in a struggling economy will pay off is a partial explanation for ongoing hoarding and liquidity traps. Nobody wants to stick their neck out on their own, without an understanding that other lenders are likely to start lending, and that consumers are likely to consume. Just as the prisoners would optimize their respective outcomes were they able to confer and act in a binding unison by which they agreed to stay mum, so too would our economy be best off if all of the economic actors agreed that they’d spend together, and kick-start a real recovery. That’s another way of looking at some of the effects of deficit spending: a form of enforceable collective action, decided upon through the deliberation of our (somewhat) democratic governmental institutions.

  This is not to say that our government’s actions are determined in an altruistic fashion with the public welfare as decision makers’ highest end—quite frequently the opposite, in fact. Which puts me and my progressive allies in the awkward position of arguing for the importance of intervention by a government that’s so clearly corrupted by the overbearing influence of the wealthiest, many of whom strive to manipulate the levers of power towards the end of self enrichment and protection of the incumbent institutions that helped them achieve their riches to being with. We can surely improve upon this dynamic: public financing of elections, with one innovative such scheme proposed later in this book, would go a long way. It’s not hard to see why many don’t trust the government to help solve our economic problems, but the government’s current failings don’t mean that a near government-less society would yield better outcomes.

  Secondly: During my time spent with the tech community I’ve heard many stirring soliloquies about Creative Destruction and the benefits that would flow to all humankind—new efficiencies, consumer surplus—were we to institute unfettered, no-holds-barred capitalism and just let ‘er rip. But to engage in such paeans to capit
alism is to recognize—and specifically lionize—the most brutal structural aspects thereof. Industries rise and fall, taking with them the livelihoods of untold workers who’ve invested their lives therein. If a given industry is in such a precipitous collapse its workers may have no other skills to parlay into basic sustenance, at no fault of their own. This is all the more reason for those who care about their fellow human beings to want to see a strong social safety net—even the likes of Hayek and Friedman, who are invoked as the spiritual leaders of so many on the modern Right, understood as much. There’s also a modicum of rational self interest to be had here: if workers weren’t (rightfully) scared to death at the prospect of losing employment, they might do less to seek government subsidy for industries that were in decline or in need of stark changes to their business models. Ahem … Hollywood? Or the hotel industry, from the perspective of bed-and-breakfast facilitator Airbnb, or the taxi industry, from the vantage of the on-demand car service Uber, and on and on.

  Specifically, government guarantees of health care—a Medicare-for-all program, more efficient than the private insurance system—and pensions more robust than Social Security—would give Americans some assurance that they wouldn’t starve. They’d enable entrepreneurship, as health care access is a concern that forces people to scurry towards and hold onto jobs they don’t want instead of starting their own shops (though this predicament will be somewhat improved under Obamacare). The appropriate societal response to hard economic times and workers’ desires for portable retirement plans isn’t to convert traditional pensions into 401(k)s—rather, it’s to institute a robust federal pension system. A step between here and there would be to adopt the plans most Europeans have access to—much more robust even under austerity than the crumbs we toss at American seniors. Such programs would also relieve employers of the burdens of carrying the cost of benefits and would generate economies of scale from which society doesn’t benefit at present.