Stop talking about SOPA
SOPA, SOPA, PIPA, SOPA ...
Stop talking about SOPA. I mean stop talking about JUST SOPA. I'm neither trying to diminish the scope of a law like SOPA or the efforts of its proponents, but seriously, is this really worth it (relatively)? Just a quick overview of what the protestors achieved:
- Headlines for the past weeks and months on major tech news sites
- the famous black out of major websites including the biggest source of knowledge, Wikipedia
- a very high number of calls, email, faxes to your senators and representatives (suspicion)
SOPA was clearly a very emotional and controversial piece of legislation that is very well worth discussing and fighting about. Me as a technophile, I clearly have an interest in the freedom of the Internet. However, my question is whether SOPA as single piece of legislation was worth all that effort or is there more behind it?
It's Democracy, bitch
While certainly controversial, I think the major issue behind SOPA, but also many other political issues is that they think that Congress (or generally politicians) doesn't listen to them, is not knowledgable of specific issues, is bought by lobbyists or sometimes just plain ignorant. We can certainly see a lot of parallels to the Occupy Movement towards the end of last year: The copyright industry was the bank industry, the blackout of the Internet was the occupation of major public space in the greatest cities in the US. Heck, like Occupy Wall Street wants to bring the bank down, people are getting really exicted to even kill Hollywood, Americas epiphany of the American Dream from dish washer to super star (YCombinators war declaration).
In both cases, people feel like they are not being heard, with the consequence that people have to resort to drastic measures such as the impressive occupation of public spaces and blackout the Internet. However, that can't be the solution. What do you do if you feel like you are not being heard? You make your congressmen listen to you. You call him and let him know that you disagree on a specific piece of law. That's democracy.
The reason why people feel that their congressmen "betrays" them and only represents the interests of the lobbyists by taking their money. The shocking truth is they do it because they can. They do not get punished for not "representing" their people, they do not get punished for acting in the their interests or the interests of the lobbyists. It's very easy to blame someone else for your misery, but truth of the matter is that you as a citizen of a democracy have the duty to inform yourself and actively participate in the political process. If the society as a whole does not give a shit about politics, then they cannot blame anyone but themselves for the consequences.
The common argument for extreme measures that Occupy Wall Street and the SOPA protestors are using, is that the general public is too little informed and just doesn't know anything about, therefore its their responsibility or even right to take measures to change it. While I agree, that the general public usually is not as informed as specific interest groups, it is quite surprising that the participation of the common citizen has IMO decreased over the years, where accessibility to information has clearly increased.
Make Democracy, not SOPA
My suggestion to all the Occupy Wall Street people and SOPA protestors and Hollywood killers is the following:
Instead of trying to convince the general public of your political stance, offer them the tools to effectively learn about pieces of legislation and participate in this democracy. I think our society as whole would have much greater benefits from a healthy democracy than a free Internet or more regulated banks, because at least we know its the majorities will. Currently, that's simply not the case, the politicians are clearly not representing their people. But instead of whining about it and give them moral preaches about how they shouldn't take money from lobbyists, make democracy great again.
To me, democracy is the greatest invention of humankind. It allows to celebrate our differences and find common ways live together in a civil way. The Internet if anything, should make it easier to push the ideals of democracy. I liked one of the election banners of the Pirate Party in Berlin:
Don't trust any election banner, go inform yourself.
SOPA is important, but the debt limit of this country of the indefinite incarceration of US citizens should play a slightly higher role (just my opinion.)
OpenCongress.org
There are plenty of source available to be a informed citizen, but one is really impressive for the US citizens among us:
It's everything, a democrat (in terms of democracy) would dream of: Open, non-partisan platform, open sourced, APIs available, "copyleft", it has all the bills, all the congressmen, their whole history of how they voted, from whom they took money, polls to see what other users think.
One of the more impressive features is Contact-Congress: It can automatically write a letter for you in which you can embed current polls, or even drop in from whom they took many and criticize that.
If you want no SOPA in the future. go spread this.