Don’t Let the Government Screw Up Yet Another Good Thing

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My apathy for politics has only grown stronger as I’ve grown older. Politicians are bought and almost entirely corrupt assholes with no other interest than themselves. I’ve remained apathetic, though, because their incompetence has never affected me. Until now. PIPA and SOPA are two bills that would ruin the Internet as we know it.

The Internet has remained largely untouched by the government, which is why we see so much growth and innovation in the tech industry. SOPA and PIPA would halter innovation and greatly inhibit people like me trying to create a business on the web.

Join me in protesting our idiot government by signing a petition to stop these bills. Or call your local senator or representative. Visit Wikipedia, Reddit, or Google today to learn more — they’re all running black outs to protest the bills.

Or learn more here. And sign the petition here. Don’t let our government screw up one more great thing.

  • http://www.facebook.com/vogon Colin Bayer

    not to pick on you, but: “The Internet has remained largely untouched by the government, which is why we see so much growth and innovation in the tech industry.”

    bullshit.  the government invented the technologies underlying the internet, and spent billions of dollars on getting them widely deployed.  the government has already tried (and succeeded, in a lot of cases!) at passing legislation regulating the things that go on over the internet — look up the Communications Decency Act of 1996, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act / Security Systems and Standards Certification Act (CBDTPA/SSSCA) when Wikipedia comes back for the previous three causes célèbres of the digerati.

    there are two problems:

    1) from the legislator’s perspective, the internet is like broadcast television or terrestrial radio.  it exists to serve people who are already in the business of producing media content, and those people already know not to do bad things.  unless you go deep down the computer literacy rabbit hole, copyright-infringing web sites are the same as pirate radio stations.

    2) mainstream internet culture thinks that it is incontrovertibly, inviolably in the right about things like SOPA and PIPA; that the facts are on their side, and that there is no reason why you can feel otherwise without being a “bought and almost entirely corrupt asshole.”  the media companies — and the other companies who are in favor of SOPA and PIPA, like couture clothing designers who are tired of seeing $5 knockoffs of their designs sold out of mall kiosks — like it or not, are made of people too. 

    people who live in constituencies, and are subject to one-man-one-vote just like the rest of us.

    you don’t get your position legitimized by yelling really loud.  you get it legitimized by reaching out to people, explaining why you’re opposed to things like this — it breaks technological measures designed to make the internet safer; it puts the onus on sites like YouTube and Wikipedia to make sure people don’t infringe copyright, even by accident — and then pointing at your all the people who believe the same thing.

    the main thing I dislike about this SOPA blackout is that it’s putting the yelling-real-loud cart before the outreach horse.  half of the sites which are blacked out, have blackouts which can be evaded.  a lot of the explanations are one paragraph saying “SOPA and PIPA are incompatible with what we’re trying to do [no further explanation] — now go bother a Congressman’s clerks all day about it.”

    basically, to tl;dr it:

    more of this: http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/18/2715768/why-the-verge-and-vox-media-are-opposed-to-sopa
    less of this: http://www.sopablackout.org/

  • http://alexlod.com Alex Loddengaard

    All good points Colin. And clearly your Internet history is better than mine. But we’re yelling because we’re fighting. And we’re fighting because we’re displeased with our pathetic government.

  • http://www.facebook.com/vogon Colin Bayer

    and you’re right to be angry about it.  I just think the yelling is going to be written off by the mass media as “A BUNCH OF INTERNET NERDS ARE ANGRY ABOUT STUFF; MORE AT 11″ instead of a legitimate political argument.

  • http://twitter.com/redhotpenguin redhotpenguin

    “Politicians are bought and almost entirely corrupt assholes with no other interest than themselves.” I think this is the way things appear on the surface, but the reality goes deeper. Politicians are interested in their constituents, and the biggest interest goes to the constituents with the most influence (read money or ability to turn out votes). This is how SOPA/PIPA came about – constituents (read corporate donors in this context) told their politicians they wanted to be protected, and helped write the legislation. If you look at it from the politician’s point of view, PIPA and SOPA are what their constituents *want*, and only now with the blackouts are they seeing the other side of things.

  • http://alexlod.com Alex Loddengaard

    I blog so infrequently about politics that when I do, I tend to express my feelings ;).

  • Tloddengaard

    I will grant that political choices are often between bad and worse, but making that choice still is worth making. The worse people are relying in people to get apathetic or hopeless. The choices then become between worse and utterly horrible.

  • http://twitter.com/redhotpenguin redhotpenguin

    You should check out some of the pieces Jack Abramoff did about the power of lobbying. It is a huge, effective machine, which requires larger efforts to stop it.