Kasztanka, Polish Marshal Józef Piłsudski's favorite combat mare, was stuffed upon her death in 1927 and after World War II was destroyed, allegedly on the orders of Piłsudski's enemy, Marshal Michał Rola-Żymierski.
Now Wikipedia is a huge web presence, and this blackout may call more attention to the nefariousness of SOPA and PIPA than the mealy-mouthed and vague descriptions of them that you'll get from most major journalistic media portals.
From their statement:
It is the opinion of the English Wikipedia community that both of these bills, if passed, would be devastating to the free and open web.
Over the course of the past 72 hours, over 1800 Wikipedians have joined together to discuss proposed actions that the community might wish to take against SOPA and PIPA. This is by far the largest level of participation in a community discussion ever seen on Wikipedia, which illustrates the level of concern that Wikipedians feel about this proposed legislation. The overwhelming majority of participants support community action to encourage greater public action in response to these two bills. Of the proposals considered by Wikipedians, those that would result in a “blackout” of the English Wikipedia, in concert with similar blackouts on other websites opposed to SOPA and PIPA, received the strongest support.
On careful review of this discussion, the closing administrators note the broad-based support for action from Wikipedians around the world, not just from within the United States. The primary objection to a global blackout came from those who preferred that the blackout be limited to readers from the United States, with the rest of the world seeing a simple banner notice instead. We also noted that roughly 55% of those supporting a blackout preferred that it be a global one, with many pointing to concerns about similar legislation in other nations.
In making this decision, Wikipedians will be criticized for seeming to abandon neutrality to take a political position. That’s a real, legitimate issue. We want people to trust Wikipedia, not worry that it is trying to propagandize them.
But although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not. As Wikimedia Foundation board member Kat Walsh wrote on one of our mailing lists recently,
We depend on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate. And we depend on a legal infrastructure that also allows other sites to host user-contributed material, both information and expression. For the most part, Wikimedia projects are organizing and summarizing and collecting the world’s knowledge. We’re putting it in context, and showing people how to make to sense of it.
But that knowledge has to be published somewhere for anyone to find and use it. Where it can be censored without due process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikimedia. Where you can only speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or, if your views are pre-approved by someone who does, the same narrow set of ideas already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to.
I've written about this before, here and here. My impression is that a lot of people just don't understand the gravity of the threat. Possibly this is partly due to a general unease people have with the rapidly changing pace of technology, and they revert to an "if in doubt, better trust authority" mindset.
I have a feeling that "Spricket 24", aka Karen Alloy, and her twin messages(regarding SOPA and PIPA legislation) have a far greater reach than your average lefty blogger. Her communication style reminds me a bit of Beakman's World, a TV show from a few years back that was apparently aimed at kids. However, somehow I don't find her irritating the way I did with him. Why, I'm not sure. Ok, that's not entirely true, I have an idea or two. She's funnier, for one thing. Also, well...oh, you know.
But even if she gets a thousand viewers for every one visitor to a site like Firedoglake or Boing Boing, what will happen then? Somewhat serious, yet coy and hip to avoid seeming too earnest is the overlay of much of modern communication, the style du jour. Maybe it's because millions of people realize that voting, advocacy, trying to change things for the better, etc., is most likely a sucker's game, but declaring this grimly without a little capering and snark is like abandoning all hope at the gate, and meekly passing through.
update, 14 Nov: Hi Sideshow-ers, and welcome to our wee nanoblog. And thanks for the kind, Avedon C., as BDR would say. And yes, she has been pointing out that we'll miss the internet when it's gone for some time.
Or maybe, "two birds with one stone(around your neck)"?
Many bad things are happening but this is one of them, and it's not just because you'll miss the internet.
The video above is via Cory Doctorow at Boingboing.net and Gary Farber. Doctorow notes that SOPA has been characterized as an end run around net neutrality, but he's right that it's much more than that, and it sounds like it's being pushed through the congress PDQ.
Doctorow:
PROTECT IP (S. 968)/SOPA (HR. 3261) creates the first system for Internet censorship - this bill has sweeping provisions that give the government and corporations leeway and legal cover for taking down sites "by accident," mistakenly, or for NOT doing "enough" to protect the interests of Hollywood. These bills that are moving very quickly through Congress and can pass before Christmas aim to give the US government and corporations the ability to block sites over infringing links posted by their users and give ISPs the release to take any means to block peoples' sites, including slowing down your connection. That's right, some say this bill is a workaround to net neutrality and is bigger than net neutrality.
I'm reminded of how quickly Visa, Mastercard and Paypal accommodated the government's request to shut down Wikileaks' funding, even though it wasn't necessarily all that clear that they were doing anything unlawful, just so the money people could demonstrate their fealty to the state, that they were going to be accommodating, while it also demonstrated how close the relationship is between the federal government and big corporations. Likewise, this doesn't sound like it's just about shutting down media piracy, but shutting down non-corporate speech, gadfly speech, whistle-blowers, etc.
Sometimes I feel like I inhabit a neighborhood of the blogosphere where the denizens usually feel like activism and demonstrating anything resembling civic earnestness just proves you're naive, and I mostly concur. All the same, I still feel this is something we should try to stop, whoever we is, via writing(or faxing) your congresspeople, etc. Even if stopping may be prove to be just delaying, it's worth it, because tomorrow's another day, etc. Anyway, the kids with the bongo drums can't do it all by themselves.
Michael S. Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg and a pioneer in formatting print material for online use, passed away Tuesday at his home in Urbana, Illinois. A self-described "unreasonable" thinker, according to his obituary at Project Gutenberg, Hart invented the ebook in 1971.
I've had a post sitting in the drafts folder for some time, tentatively titled "Lit Blogging", which included the following article link:
Elizabeth Weingarten, Slate:"Fantastic Typing Machines" A gallery of old typewriters that look more like sewing machines, phonographs, and torture devices.
This was published September 7th, the same day Michael Hart's obit appeared in the LA Times, and I suppose you could construe that as an irony. However it wouldn't surprise me in the least if Hart also liked typewriters and maybe even missed them. As far as I can see e-books are no more a threat to books than automobiles were to horses, although I wonder if e-books and the digitization of text will render access to three dimensional books(that you can't imperceptibly edit after the fact, a la 1984) a luxury item, per market forces. Maybe access to an undiluted historical record will also become a luxury good, like horses are in some places.
Having said that, I also imagine Hart recognized this was a genie that had to be let out of the bottle, and that corporatism and corrupt government practices were the enemy, not technology per se. For example he was against the expansion of copyright laws and the increasing commercialization of the commons, which of course are interlinked.
(I'm not sure when this article was published, circa 1997. It refers to the pending Digital Millenium Copyright Act(DMCA), which of course became law the following year.)
I saw this ad on Yahoo's home page yesterday. What exactly is Prudential going to do to me if I outlive my money? Should I hide? Somebody got paid money to come up with this ridiculous ad, and I'm blogging for free. It just ain't right.
And today in a peculiar thematic coincidence, I saw this link at the bottom of a story over at Slate.com:
(This item originally appeared in October 2010.) Maybe author Jennifer Sandberg or somebody else at eHow thought the title would encourage people to read it.
The online encyclopaedia has fallen foul of UK privacy law in recent weeks, with details about those using super-injunctions appearing on the site. [...] Mr Wales said his personal view was that privacy laws were "grave injustices and human rights violations". "They should be done away with as quickly as possible. There should be no law constraining people from publishing legally obtained, factual information," he said. Exceptions to this would be information that was life-threatening, such as troop movements. "But we aren't talking about that. This is embarrassing facts about politicians and celebrities".
I didn't know they were called "super-injunctions" in the UK. Actually, I was meaning to write about this topic a few weeks ago when I saw a dubiously titled Yahoo News/AP item [also here] about "the right to be forgotten" which smelled to me like one of those news items that is spun to make it seem like it was about the rights of 'the little guy' when in fact it was advocacy, via an ostensibly non-editorial, straight news story, regarding the rights of the wealthy and elites generally, and the presumptive rights of the encroaching security state, here and elsewhere.
MADRID – Their ranks include a plastic surgeon, a prison guard and a high school principal. All are Spanish, but have little else in common except this: They want old Internet references about them that pop up in Google searches wiped away. In a case that Google Inc. and privacy experts call a first of its kind, Spain's Data Protection Agency has ordered the search engine giant to remove links to material on about 90 people. The information was published years or even decades ago but is available to anyone via simple searches.
Scores of Spaniards lay claim to a "Right to be Forgotten" because public information once hard to get is now so easy to find on the Internet. Google has decided to challenge the orders and has appealed five cases so far this year to the National Court. Some of the information is embarrassing, some seems downright banal. A few cases involve lawsuits that found life online through news reports, but whose dismissals were ignored by media and never appeared on the Internet. Others concern administrative decisions published in official regional gazettes. In all cases, the plaintiffs petitioned the agency individually to get information about them taken down.
Why, for example, should a surgeon get the law to help him hide the fact that he was sued 18 years before? If one must regulate searches for court decisions, wouldn't a statement that automatically pops up reminding us that they may be subject to appeal be sufficient?
Some people get this and some people don't. Perhaps ironically, traditional, non-whackjob conservatism was supposed to be against this sort of thing. You know, before Freidman and "the Chicago Boys", before Thatcher and Reagan, etc. But that was then, and the expansion of the security state is very much an establishment, bipartisan project most places nowadays.
I remember a few years ago when "COPS" was really popular, before the digital 'blurring" technology was widely available, thinking they wouldn't dare do any of that crap with a camera crew if it was somebody in a nice neighborhood, but they take it for granted that they wont get into trouble with videotaping poor people. This is especially true as their privacy is being violated concurrently with their brush with the law, which for a poor person generally means a major economic hit, because while bail and attorney's fees of a few hundred or a few thousand may be a manageable irritant if you live in a tony suburb, but financially devastating if you're scraping by at eight or nine bucks an hour, and may take years to recover from.
In the early 90s I also saw an article about how threatened and intimidated one semi-anonymous participant felt, feeling she had to co-operate with the COPS people or she would face more grief from the actual cops, especially because of how chummy they seemed. I learned from the article* that they did in fact have the subjects sign waivers, but the narrative painted a picture of very difficult circumstances that suggested the very situation was inevitably coercive. Nowadays of course they blur their faces with digital editing, although there are questions that arise from that too. For example, the blurring of images will make it easy for people to think something is not being hidden from us when it is, and people will be more complacent about it. The edit is quicker than the eye.
More recently I remember hearing of a motorcyclist making the news with his helmet cam video [see video above; the autoblog.com link also includes a longer version of the video] which recorded a plainclothes Maryland state trooper stopping him and pulling a gun on him. He posted it on Youtube and shortly afterward the cops came with a warrant for his computers and camera, per a Md. state law against audibly recording someone without their consent. (It's a felony.)
I'm guessing the Maryland law has been on the books for a while and was originally intended to target surreptitious telephone recording, but clearly it was being utilized in Anthony Graber's case to quash his attempt to embarrass the state troopers. Graber was speeding and riding recklessly, no question, but the idea that it should be so easy for the authorities to be able to confiscate such recordings should sit uneasily with anybody who cares about the law protecting against unlawful police behavior and such.
I don't know what the answer is, and clearly the technologies are developing pretty rapidly. Maybe, for example, shows like "COPS" are a necessary evil in an open society, even as seem to exist to demonize and dehumanize poor people in the eyes of the viewers. I also wonder if the writing is on the wall, and the US may find itself becoming more like Spain and the UK in the future. Whatever happens, it pays to be skeptical when you see an article or program about privacy rights, and the courts and media purporting to be "looking out for the little guy."
more from the BBC article: Experts warned that the lawyers of celebrities could turn the tables, pressing for ISPs and firms such as Twitter to hand over the details of who is publishing comments on the site. To do so they would need to obtain what is known as a Norwich Pharmacal order from a judge, the same process used by rights holders to force ISPs to hand over details about alleged illegal file-sharers. "Celebrities could apply for Norwich Pharmacal orders against ISPs, Twitter or other parties holding data that may lead to the identification of a defendant," said solicitor Michael Forrester of law firm Ralli. "The position is much more difficult when dealing with companies based in the US, such as Twitter and Google.
Dennis Perrin shares his thoughts on the efficacy of the web as a tool for change (He even mentions yours truly, thanks Dennis) which is certainly well worth reading as are all of Dennis’ posts and essays. Dennis points out that we are too depoliticalized and “scattered to the commercial winds” for even the beginnings of change for the better. I think that’s quite true. It was the last presidential election that really convinced me the web hadn’t really changed anything. Most liberal blogs were convinced that Obama was the answer and shilled for him ceaselessly and were fond of saying that once Obama was in office (the only important thing) that he should be pressured to pursue progressive policies. Though of course what happened was once Obama was president all pressure ceased immediately and liberals went into defense mode.
People often ask “why this” or “what do we do” as if there is some kind of recipe that will ensure change for the better yet there isn’t any sure road any more than Obama has a sure road in Afghanistan. If Obama really knew what he was doing he wouldn’t be changing plans in Afghanistan like some people change their underwear. If people are really committed to some kind of change they should eliminate what doesn’t work even if it has worked in the past. Things like voting, protesting, calling reps, writing the president, signing petitions, to bring change obviously don’t work the proof being that Bush’s horrendous domestic and foreign policies remain largely unchanged. The web helped elect a Democrat but that no longer signifies much of anything. There is no easy answer for any of this. I certainly do not advocate violence for even if a violent revolution succeeded the new government would quickly devolve into something like it already is unless there was some kind of real sea-change in our culture. Plus violence is what I am against in the first place.
Dennis articulates a very realistic answer so check out what he has to say.
