nickdouglas:

The History, and Future, of Web Protest - Anil Dash

“Maybe we should be darkening our sites for deeper, more profound issues [as well as fighting SOPA]. We have the ability to affect marriage equality and reproductive freedom and immigration reform and many other issues where those of us who love technology tend to have similar values regardless of which of the traditional political parties we list on our voter registrations.”

I have to disagree here, for a few reasons. First, the selfish: I don’t want my internet blacked out or screwed with all the time. Then, the practical: people won’t care enough to keep calling, and Congress will start tuning them out.

Anil refers to “those of us who love technology”. But the SOPA/PIPA protest didn’t work because of those of us who love technology. We had already called and written and signed petitions. It worked precisely because people who would never go near reddit or Boing Boing got the message, people who had never even heard of the bills.

And those people don’t all “tend to have similar values”. I’ll buy that the average person who already knew about SOPA/PIPA supports marriage equality, reproductive freedom, and immigration reform, but plenty of those people who called on Wednesday don’t. Google, Facebook, and Twitter could shut down and they still wouldn’t be calling to support those issues. 

I can understand some of the sites that participated taking political stances. But Google? Wikipedia? Twitpic? Why the hell would Twitpic have a stance on immigration reform?

For Wikipedia, which was in many ways the biggest player in the blackout, publicly—and it doesn’t get more public than this—taking a political stance is particularly dangerous, and inappropriate. Wikipedia is not as neutral as it would like to be. And I don’t think it’s impossible for them to have a political arm and still be a fair and unbiased encyclopedia. But it would have a strong appearance of impropriety, and it would certainly rub me the wrong way. 

SOPA/PIPA was uniquely positioned for this protest. It isn’t a “values” issue (you could take away computers and much of my newsfeed wouldn’t protest defunding Planned Parenthood, but they protested SOPA/PIPA). It’s an issue that would affect nearly everyone who uses the internet. And it’s an issue that would directly affect the blacked-out websites. Without the first two conditions, most people aren’t going to participate. And without the last one, most websites shouldn’t.