Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by and David Moon Patrick Ruffini David Segal Read Free Book Online

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.
Patrick Ruffini
    SOPA could be read to cover social sites like Twitter and Facebook, demanding they actively take steps to prevent pirated content before it was posted. Not only were newer, venture-funded social and mobile startups the darlings of the Internet economy; they were exactly the tools one would use to defeat government censorship, whether earlier in 2011 in Egypt or, now, in the United States.
    It was this dynamic, triggered by SOPA but not by PIPA, which caused the Internet—led by smaller players like Tumblr and reddit, more than by established players like Google—to go on nuclear alert.
David Segal
    Not only was PIPA a priority for both Hollywood and its major unions like the Teamsters, but the analogous dynamic was playing out at the national scale, with storybook antagonists like the Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO both supportive, and even purveying joint propaganda at their various Capitol Hill lobby days. Indeed, noting organized labor’s support for the legislation was one of proponents’ mantras throughout the battle.
Patrick Ruffini
    One lobbyist involved in the anti-SOPA effort described the scene early one morning in the cafeteria at the Rayburn House Office Building at the height ofthe debate. Their team would convene at around 7:30 a.m. for member and staff meetings, and had so much ground to cover with that no more than one person was ever in meeting with a member or staffer at once; usually, in-house lobbyists and consultants teamed up. They also noticed the entertainment lobby was out in full force, with around fifty lobbyists convened at eight or nine tables pushed together. The anti-SOPA lobbyists set forth for their first wave of meetings, and reconvened at 9 a.m. When they returned, they noticed something odd: few if any of the pro-SOPA lobbyists appeared to have moved from their seats in an hour and a half.
David Segal
    Labor’s support for SOPA/PIPA was by no means uniform: institutional leadership tended to support the bills, but without exception, actual rank-and-file union members and organizers whom I spoke to were aghast to learn of the work that labor officials were undertaking in their names. And even some institutional players broke free from the apparent pro-SOPA/PIPA consensus. One unsung hero of this story is the Writers Guild of America, West, which in 2007 had gained the nation’s attention and sympathy when its members went on strike over DVD and new media residuals.
The WGAW
    “On the House side, Keyser and Barrios met with Reps. Henry Waxman, Howard Berman, and Janice Hahn. They thanked Waxman for his strong support of Guild issues and discussed concerns with the recently introduced Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Because Berman is a co-sponsor of SOPA, the pair discussed their concerns with the bill’s implications for competition and an open Internet. Although the WGAW strongly supports combating piracy, the competition, First Amendment, and due process concerns the bill creates must be addressed.”
David Segal
    As Fight for the Future launched that October, they had in mind the mobilization of an entirely different crowd that was similarly predominantly apolitical: people who pay attention to Justin Bieber. Klobuchar’s bill could’ve turned him (more likely his mom) into a felon. FFTF’s campaign entailed launching a satirical site that was to serve as the hub of the “Free Bieber” movement. Their crack design staff mocked up several images of the Biebs behind bars, which straddled the line between hilarious and genuinely disturbing—one had him stuck in a cell, crying a L’il Wayne tattooed tear, caught in the gaze of