Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet (36 page)

During the SOPA/PIPA fight the Suicide Girls social media sites used their pin-up imagery to alert visitors about the legislation.

As the Managing Editor of the SuicideGirls’ blog, I spend my days writing, editing, and posting content that’s relevant to our community, and as one of the undercover tweeters on the @SuicideGirls account, I spend much of my spare time interacting with our followers there.

What I do at SG is so much more than a job—it’s a privilege and a vocation. As a writer, I’ve been given an incredible amount of freedom to raise awareness for the issues I’m passionate about. As an editor, my greatest joy is to allow other similarly passionate voices to be heard. And as a member of the social media team, I have the pleasure of interacting with a group of tweeps that really “get it.”

Founded in 2001, SuicideGirls was actually one of the first social networks, predating Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook. As such, it has a long history of attracting tech savvy early adopters, and free and forward thinkers. Though most outsiders know us as an alternative pinup site, behind the photographs of staunchly individual ladies on our homepage—images that we hope help redefine beauty—there’s a boutique community that allows members to make friends, post blogs, and interact as adults. The conversations in the myriad of groups and boards are as colorful and creative as our members, and the friends I’ve made over the years on the site are of the caliber that I will retain for life.

On the blog we cover many topics that are obviously related to the site, such as tattoos, piercings, sex, relationships, and geek culture. But SuicideGirls also has a long tradition of campaigning for freedom of expression and social issues, and covering the politics that relate to them too. I can hear the needle scratching off the record in the minds of the uninitiated at the mention of politics being posted alongside our bewbs, but this is actually more logical than you may think when you consider the origins of our name.

SuicideGirls doesn’t refer to any lemming-like tendencies to jump off cliffs. Rather it was a phrase coined by
Fight Club
author Chuck Palahniuk, which he used in his 1999 novel
Survivor
. We use it to describe women who choose to commit social suicide from the mainstream by permanently marking their bodies with tattoos. This concept of social suicide also explains why there’s a natural
affinity between us and social justice movements that promote progressive ideas that exist outside of the mainstream.

When SOPA and its ugly sister PIPA first reared their ugly heads, unlike the technological Neanderthals who drafted it, the hive mind on Twitter soon zoned in on the problematic small print and the ramifications thereof. Reading the tweets that bore the #SOPA hashtag that swarmed within our stream, it rapidly became apparent that this legislation would have a chilling effect on sites such as SuicideGirls, which incorporate massive amounts of user generated content. It would be utterly impractical and economically unviable to police the providence of all the links and content posted by our models and members on their blogs and in the countless forums and comments threads prior to publishing. And being forced to do so would seriously stifle the freedom of speech that our community currently enjoys.

Under the restrictive and open-ended terms of SOPA, it would be virtually impossible for a site such as ours to function, which is why we—along with other social media sites such as reddit, Tumblr, Flickr, Fark, and 4chan—participated in the January 18th day of action. Unlike the more editorial driven sites we love such as Wired, Boing Boing, and Rawstory, as a subscriber funded online community offering a service to our members, blacking out entirely wasn’t an option on #J18. We therefore had to find other creative ways to protest SOPA, and show solidarity with the sites that were able to go dark.

We posted a special “Tease of the Day” which featured the gorgeous Arabella Suicide in a set of photographs entitled “Pirate Girl.” Despite the fact that pertinent parts of her anatomy had been redacted with black bars that bore the words “STOP SOPA!” in large pink Helvetica type, it remains to this day one of the most re-tweeted items on our blog. Similarly, other posts explaining the problems with SOPA and covering the deafening #J18 silence count among our most read and shared posts. We also had fun with self-censored tweets containing messages such as “Stop #SOPA Now!!! … Before it
to your Internet.”

Despite the fact that crickets could be heard in all the coolest corners of the web, January 18, 2012 went down as an #EPIC day in Internet history, and was a veritable riot on Twitter. The day of action garnered massive support from all corners of the web, from giant organizations such as Wikipedia and Google, to grassroots blogs and Twitter accounts run by our Occupy and Anon friends.

After being bombarded by phone calls, emails and online petitions, several senators distanced themselves from SOPA, with at least ten withdrawing their support by day’s end. With many of their fave sites offline, Internet lovers in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Vegas took to the streets. Meanwhile members of the artistic community made their voice heard with an open letter to Washington.

However the MPAA and much of Hollywood’s old guard remained defiant. Their refusal to understand the new paradigm, and their determination to wage war against their greatest consumers—and turn their customers into a criminal class—merely serves to underline how out of touch they are with their future
sales base. Meanwhile their actions ironically alienate many of the outlets that promote their wares (as ours does with entertainment-based columns, reviews, and interviews). In a statement and via multiple (and quite absurd) tweets, the MPAA explained/excused their pro-SOPA stance by blaming “foreign criminals,” claiming that they were taking action to defend “American jobs”—an argument that doesn’t really hold up when you consider research which indicates the biggest sharers of copyrighted material are also the biggest consumers.

Though many of the politicians that support SOPA, and the corporations that bought them, remain unrepentant, the unprecedented day of online action thrust the issue of Internet freedom to the fore, educating many who were previously unaware of the bills and forcing the mainstream media—however unwillingly—to report a little of the Orwellian reality that laws like SOPA and PIPA would bring.

But the fight is far from over. Though #SOPA and its supporters made a hasty retreat, many of the provisions are rearing their ugly heads in a seemingly endless barrage of new SOPA-like Return of SOPA / Son of SOPA legislation. However this time the online massive is ready for the onslaught of those who purport to represent us but in reality kowtow to lobbyists and serve those who contribute the most to their campaigns.

Many lines were drawn in the sand on January 18th. Between the outlets who prioritize their readers and those that serve their advertisers. Between media corporations that understand the digital generation, and those that don’t. And between out of touch lawmakers, and those plugged into the collective online consciousness.

Many bonds were forged on that day too. As those that joined in the fight to # StopSOPA worked their magic on Twitter, allies were found and new friendships were born. Those who self-identify as Occupiers and/or Anons, who are more used to working outside the system, stood shoulder-to-shoulder online with mainstream businesses that had the balls to stick their necks out for the cause. Tactics were learned and shared. Hashtags were trended and jacked. A seemingly disparate group of activists, non-profits, and progressive corporations worked together as powerful machines of dissent, and have continued to do so in the months since, not only coordinating protests against the curtailment of Internet rights, but real world ones too, such as those threatened by the #NDAA.

Another lesson was learned that day too. For too long, our politicians, and the corporations that have pwned them, have had it too easy, ruling over an apathetic, ill-informed, distracted, and, for the most part, docile population that might run riot over a lost Giants game but by and large won’t fight for basic human rights. But that’s changing. Rebellion is in the air and it was online like never before on #J18.

An exceedingly bright young man called Jake Davis (a.k.a. Lulzsec hactivist Topiary) once said that “laws are to be respected when they’re fair, not obeyed without question.” Unfortunately, the laws that rule the Internet are often decidedly unfair, and are frequently so arbitrary and arcane that they’d be laughable but for the fact that good people are languishing in jail and businesses have been destroyed because of them.

At best these laws are outdated, as is the case with those that fall under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which predates the hyperlinked Internet as we know it. At worst, they’re stacked in favor of big business and special interest groups, as was the case with the MPAA-promoted travesties of judgment that were PIPA and SOPA. Indeed the labyrinth of archaic and/or poorly drafted legislation with regards to computers and the Internet is so confusing that even our judiciary has a hard time navigating them. So how on earth do we expect the average end user to?

As I write these final paragraphs, two fairly random recent news items come to mind that are not entirely unconnected. The first is the story of a 9-year-old girl, who had her Winnie the Poo laptop confiscated by Finnish police after she attempted to preview a song by pop star Chisu’. After she inadvertently clicked on a Pirate Bay link, the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Centre in Finland (TTVK) sent a missive demanding six hundred Euros from her father, who responded with a letter and photographs of a bought album and concert tickets. I’m not sure what lesson that 9-year-old girl learned about copyright and respect for authority, but I’m sure it wasn’t the one the copyright clowns or agents of the law intended.

The second story draws from a study conducted by the Munich School of Management and Copenhagen Business School, which indicates that the U. S. Government’s decision to shut down file hosting site Megaupload anyway in the wake of SOPA’s failure—an action that was done at the behest of the RIAA and MPAA—actually negatively impacted Hollywood box office revenues both in the U.S. and around the globe. Not surprisingly, non-blockbuster films that rely on word of mouth rather then big marketing budgets appeared to be most affected by Megaupload’s demise, which doesn’t bode well for the long term health of independent movie or music making if we’re to continue on this course of litigation and criminalization.

Indeed, there is a mounting weight of evidence which suggests that those who fileshare the most also legitimately buy the most. The irony here is that those who will likely be harmed by any future PIPA and SOPA-like legislation include those who are lobbying the hardest for it. Instead of investing in shoddy and mean-spirited legislation, the entertainment industry would be better served investing their money in talent and products worthy of our consumption. If they spent less time biting the 9-year-old hand that feeds them, and tying the hands of websites that either intentionally or unintentionally evangelize for them, we’d all be better off—and better entertained.

OpenCongress became an important source of information for countless thousands of concerned Americans who wanted to track developments in the SOPA/PIPA fight. OpenCongress brings together official government data with news coverage, blog posts, public comments, and more to give you the real story behind what’s happening in Congress. Small groups of political insiders and lobbyists already know what’s really going on in Congress. Now, everyone can be an insider
.

We launched OpenCongress back in February 2007—recognizing the cliché, that’s some ancient history in Web time. Every day since then, we’ve watch-dogged the work of the publicly despised, partisan gridlocked, historically unproductive, systemically corrupt U. S. Congress. Along the way, huge issues have come up: in 2008, a global financial crisis and stimulus bill; in 2009, President Obama’s major health-care reform bill; in 2010, the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation; plus unemployment insurance, immigration bills, and many more.

Since 2007, OpenCongress has grown to receive up to one million visits per month from visitors searching to track and understand what’s happening in the U.S. Congress—averaging around twenty-five thousand visits per weekday. But over the past five years, our single biggest-ever day of traffic was January 18th, 2012—the day of the SOPA strike against net censorship. OpenCongress received over two hundred sixty thousand visits and more than half a million pageviews that day alone to bill pages for SOPA/PIPA—beating our previous single-day traffic peak of one hundred forty-five thousand on March 22nd, 2010, around the health-care bill.

The PPF team and I are proud of how OpenCongress served as a go-to public resource in the stop-SOPA movement. OpenCongress combines official government information with news and blog coverage, campaign contribution data, social wisdom from around the Web, and free public participation tools. We’re a free, open-source, not-for-profit, and non-partisan public resource with primary funding support from the Sunlight Foundation.