Wired State

Boycotting Huffpo Comments in Support of Blogger's Strike

I'm going to support the strike against the Huffington Post by some unpaid bloggers by not posting any comments on the site. A group called Visual Art Source is calling a strike.

The leader of this content umbrella group, Bill Lasarow, has two demands:

First, a pay schedule must be proposed and steps initiated to implement it for all contributing writers and bloggers. Second, paid promotional material must no longer be posted alongside editorial content; a press release or exhibition catalogue essay is fundamentally different from editorial content and must be either segregated and indicated as such, or not published at all.

It hadn't occured to me that some of the writers we see on Huffpo extolling this or that tech gadget might be a paid promotional writer whose piece should have a box around it to segregate it, or, as they say at the Times, go in "the Mobil ad space". But that's a brilliant request and I love it. They should do it for TechCrunch, too. AOL is now in a position possibly to make good on such a request. I think the consumer is owed this honesty.

But I'd go further -- I want to be able to see the difference between a staff writer paid for journalism, and unpaid bloggers -- they are uneven in quality. I'd like to see that when I read the piece, not have to go fishing for lists of staff.

So I support this strike effort, and won't put comments up until the demands are met.

Not a very big sacrifice, as I don't post comments there much, as to do so means you are lost in a sea of 500-1,000 other comments, most of them by anonymous trolling assholes and brainless "progressive" twits. Sometimes if I feel strongly sometimes, I'll post with my Facebook log-on and link to Facebook, which is a little pointless as the moderator has to approve your comment, and doesn't always, thereby losing your FB "share".

I have no idea how I got the rank "super-user" with so few comments and "likes" but there it is. Little mediocrities who swell the ranks of Anonymous argue obnoxiously with you in the comments about basic obvious truths with the usual Fisking and Haskelling -- it's boring. It's just too much of a mob scene and you can't even get the page to load if you aren't on a super-fast connection. Even so, I will do my little part for paid content -- and not even so much paid comment as *the conversation*. I want a conversation. I will not play the civility game (more on that later) and if an author can't be arsed to come and talk to some of the people commenting and respond to their valid points and critiques, the hell with the platform. And if the publisher, who makes money, can't be bothered to pay SOMETHING for this content that he makes money from, I don't want to be working as a CMS serf, either.

So I'm adding now the Huffington Post to my (so far short) list of sites I won't post to because a) the authors of blogs on them never, ever talk to the people in the comments and/or b) bloggers are not paid, even a symbolic fee.

My first site on this list was www.rferl.org -- actually a very beloved site of mine and even though I will stop making comments there and will put them all on my own blog, it's a site I will continue to go on reading several times a day, as I have as long as the Internet has been in existence. With RFE/RL, I feel more forgiving about the unpaid content -- they don't have the budget for content that Huffington, a profitable commercial enterprise has, as they are funded by the U.S. Congress from the taxpayer. RFE/RL does pay for op-ed pieces in the news section.

The other day I went to an interesting luncheon in a Manhattan high-rise with an intriguing off-the-record speaker and I ran into a few journalists and bloggers, some actually very well known, one of whom I have long respected and whose book I have recommended or given as a present. And I was surprised to hear a group of these fine writers complaining about the pay rates for op-ed and blog pieces going down. I talked about how many of the content mills out there (and I had in mind the most lucrative tech blogs) could now easily outsource comments to, say, a scholar or expert in India or Russian tech experts and they could probably get away with paying $50 a post. I don't know what TechCrunch pays its guest authors, I bet its more than that (I hope so).

I was then surprised to hear a famous person say, "But I'm that Indian scholar, I'm that person willing to earn only $50 a post because that's what there is to make."

Indeed, the existence of all these unpaid bloggers, some of them very well known with huge mindshare and traffic, has made it so that people who need to earn a living cannot earn it anymore.

The 6,000 bloggers at Huffpo contain a lot of tech types who make a fortune at their IT jobs (coders earn $100,000-$150,000 as a routine matter) and who blog in the evenings, or even at their low-demand jobs during the day. Or maybe they are only tech help deskers who earn less than a coder, but they have time to play Twitter and Huffo blog. This bunch is highly opionated -- they've come to see themselves as experts on everything, as everything is digitalized. So the guy who just ran the IT in this or that institution then comes in time to positions of power and lords it over everyone.

When you look at the zillions of bloggers on Huffpo, you see a lot of them are white male geek types, although of course not only. There are plenty of others of course of the proper rainbow coalition -- it's very "progressive". Students, homemakers, etc. also make up the blogging masses.

What I'd like to know is how much traffic was brought to the bloggers' pages to pay the ads, and how much to the regular paid staff pages.

 

 

Embedded Deception

I was just having a Facebook debate with Eric Rice (Spin Martin) -- the famous podcast dude and SL developer who lived in Silicon Valley and has now moved to a farm in Washington State.

I was calling him out for a comment he made (just like Chris Abraham the other day on Twitter) about a news article that the Chinese government was going to start tracking people on their cell phones -- and then just like Chris (they're in the same Wired State class of tekkies and social media makkers) he added "like that couldn't happen here *snark*".

I remarked that this was already happening in Belarus with the help of an Austrian mobile company, and that in fact, it wasn't happening here. In fact, if the liberal democratic state of the U.S. goes to cell phone companies, like it can already go to land line companies, to obtain records in lawful pursuit of suspected criminal activity, that's ok. Yeah, truly. You know, it's ok to fight actual crime, and these things -- unlike Russia or China -- are reviewed and examined and judged by independent judiciary and hordes of lawyers and NGOs.  Or are you saying that cell phone chat should be a magic Autonomous Zone like a Second Life elf sim, guys? Really.

So the usual argument ensued, where Eric tries to justify himself. He muses about what he thinks of Russia and China and how, "we're getting like them".

I explain how, um, no, we're not. We as bloggers and social media users are not MURDERED; we are not JAILED AND TORTURED, you know, like our equivalents in Russia and China.

Eric thinks a little, and basically says this: but he needs to say things like "snark snark could happen here" to distance himself from the likes of Sarah Palin. Wouldn't want to be like them! See, that's what it's really about. Nervously looking over one's shoulder at the religious right, the conservatives, the Tea Party and wanting to make sure that all the signals, nods, winks are in place so that everyone knows you are not like that tribe.

I point out that the reason the "progressives" never really become persuasive and have significant followers and in fact face such resistance from the right and even liberal middle is because they do this, and that posturing in such moral equivalency in fact means they are lying about the nature of oppressive regimes like Russia and China have and are not serious about what real harm is to journalists and bloggers in those countries, making it seem like "it could happen here".

Eric thinks about this, and then...he brings it out.  A case that will show how Amerika is becoming horrible like those other places, yes it is! And here it is: a case of a man who was arrested *merely for linking to a TV site*. Yes, *merely for embedding a video!" OMGODZORZ! It could happen to any of us! Haven't we embedded youtubes in our blogs??? Are we SURE they were all in the public domain????

I asked whether the website in fact was child porn or something -- I wanted to hear the context because it was NOT CREDIBLE. You wouldn't be arrested "just for embedding a video". Please. Although that's what 100 blogs are probably describing it as.

So Eric replies (and hey, if he doesn't think embedding videos is so terrible I'm sure he won't mind me, um, embedding a public Facebook dialogue on my blog, either : )  -- as follows:

It was over intellectual property issues. Links to TV show vids. Like embedding someone's Daily Show or Fox News youtube clips. The Sony legal briefs, judgements, subpoenas in this article: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/03/geohot-site-unmasking/ and the arrest story developing (legal docs inbound) is here: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110303/16584013356/ice-arrests-operator-seized-domain-charges-him-with-criminal-copyright-infringement.shtml

Incidentally, the latter is handled by Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement division. Over TV Show links.

That's a bit over-the-top. THAT is what I'd expect from Russia or China, not here. I'd hate to see our gov get REALLY PISSED.

So gosh, I had to go see what this AWFUL THING THAT EVIL HOMELAND SECURITY WAS DOING OMGODZORZ WE'RE GETTING JUST LIKE RUSSIA HERE.

And it turns out that this 32-year-old guy ran a site called channelsurfing.net  -- that already tells you this isn't just his blog, and not some one-time thing, but an operation, a website devoted to this purpose of streaming masses of other people's content.

Furthermore, it's not just some Daily Show clip, of the sort you find on Yahoo or a blog everyday, but sportcasting. Entire sports shows. Stolen from the feeds of the national sports federations.

Click through to Paid Content to see the fuller dimensions of the story, which says:

He’s accused of pirating telecasts of sporting events held by various sports leagues, including the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League, World Wrestling Entertainment and Ultimate Fighting Championship.

And he's accused of making $90,000 from advertising.

Oh, I see. Oh, Eric. That's not like Russia or China breaking a journalist's arm or throwing him in a dank jail cell over writing about government corruption and pollution of the environment. Um, can you tell the difference?!

Eric is upset -- like other tekkies -- that this guy is a) the subject of Homeland Security and b) put in detention pending trial. The $90,000 is "alleged" and so on.

Well, let's say you ran an illegal chop shop where you stole cars, and you chopped them up for parts or refit them and resold them "hot", and you made $90,000 from this. Would you and your shop and your ill-gotten gains be acceptable somehow? No, of course not. You would be arrested for theft and your chop-shop would not be considered, um, a parking spot for just your car.

Would you say, oh, that's so unfair! Why has that man gone to jail? No, of course you wouldn't! Especially if it was your car, on a street in a suburb of San Francisco in Silicon Valley, right?

In the same way, if you open up a website, and you pirate feeds to it, and embed them, and make money from the ads, you are guilty of theft on a grand scale.

Why is this so hard to understand??? Why is this somehow the government being "evil"?! It's not. It's perfectly adequate prosecution of theft. Of crime. It's enforcement of copyright that needs to be done. The sportcasters have a right to their work and their IP and their product that they have to spend money making and distributing. My God, why is this so fucking hard for you freaks to get?

It's not only that language is corrupted. That war on private property unleashed by Lessig, Doctorow and company of the EFF has so skewed people's minds that they actually think the "human right" involved here now is "my right to steal anything on the Internet I feel like and make money off it" and that the "human rights violation" is when the Homeland Security or any other authority intervenes.

It's worse. It's that they actually think all of that silly stuff AND they can't admit at some level of their being that this is really different than what happens to people on the Internet in China and Russia. When I think of Russian journalist Oleg Kashin, with his arm and head broken and being hospitalized with an induced coma and somehow struggling to survive and coming out and continuing his Live Journal...brutalized by thugs related to a local corrupt government trying to chop down a forest that environmentalists are trying to save -- a story he was covering. When I think of the Chinese ecologists struggling with their issues and being harassed and jailed or this Tibetan green activist imprisoned for five years....

...And then I think of Bryan McCarthy, a 32-year-old Texas resident, charged with embedding stolen sports broadcasts and making a buck off them, and try to somehow compare this...my mind boggles. It just truly boggles.

What do I need to do to get someone like Eric (who is probably still convinceable; a prat like Chris Abraham is probably impossible to ever reason with) to realize how different all this? How the scale of abuses is so much more -- so wildly more! -- abusive in these really authoritarian countries? That this fake chimera of an abusive Amerika -- a shadow that these overfed children like to scare themselves with in Silicon Valley in their ranch homes while they drink mohitos on their decks -- could actually begin to convince them, that they can't see reality...

ICE said that McCarthy made $90,000 from advertising on the site, but doesn’t specify over what time period those profits were made. McCarthy first registered channelsurfing.net back in 2005. The site has received more than 1.3 million hits since it was seized last month.

Well, honestly. Why is it ok to steal sportscast, bring 1.3 million people to click on your ads with them, and make $90,000? It's not. If you are suspected of this crime, and you were arrested, that means there was probably cause to arrest you. It's not like your arm is going to broken; you will not likely be tortured; and if you are innocent, you will have ample lawyers -- likely the EFF will help!

So sorry -- you're not credible if you tell me I need to see this as proof -- or even some sort of indication of concern -- that America "is getting" like China.

I'm much, much more likely to draw a different conclusion here: that your believing that; you willingness to lie about China through moral equivocation; you're inability to see the differences -- THAT is what is more likely to "make us like Russia or China" than something Homeland Security is doing.

So, in short, Eric, why don't I believe you? Why do I find you NOT CREDIBLE? Because you were willing to take a story like this and so twist it, so bend it, so spindle and mutilate it that you could actually claim it to be an example of how America is "becoming like China". That you are so deeply embedded in this deception that you actually think literally that when I don't find you credible, it's  a problem of me being too patriotic to see any flaws in Amerika, or too credulous to think my Homeland Security could arrest a guy "over the Internet".

And you  actually seem incapable of understanding: your reason is eroded. Your mind is going. You can't see reality. This arrest for a crime is nothing like what happened to Oleg; it's nothing like what happened to the Tibetan green activist. It's different. Those countries are worse. It's ok to say that. It doesn't mean you are uncritical about the U.S. But you get the difference. And you don't claim that pirating sportscasting and making $90,000 off it -- two little bits of context you didn't see fit to put in your Facebook rant -- make all the difference. And that's OK to prosecute.

"We Pretend to Work, They Pretend to Pay Us": Why I Stopped Commenting on RFE/RL

If you didn't live in the Soviet era, the old adage, "We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us" may not carry any resonance for you. It was a phrase that rang true everywhere about the collectivization system -- people didn't work very hard in collective farms, they stole the implements and produce whenever they could, they did as little as possible for the state, and put their passion into their own truck gardens, which provided one third of the Soviet Union's actual food sources, by the estimates of the economist Lev Timofeyev in his seminal book _{The Peasant's Art of Starving}. And returning the favour, the state paid the collective farm workers and the laborers massed in huge state factories a pittance, or even paid them in kind, i.e. with shoes or a washing machine instead of cash, and also kept them pinned to their estates like the old serfs under the tsar with the internal passport or propiska system, still in effect today.

The collectivization of content on the Internet works the same way. I accept that thesis, I work within it, but I'm starting to want a little bit more pretend payment.

As noted, I'm done putting comments in the RFE/RL Content Management System -- I'm tired of being a CMS serf there.

We pretend to work -- we're just commenters, we're just typing an unpaid thought -- and they pretend to pay us -- we get visibility next to their "real" authors; we could also be unpaid contributors to their blogging system if we like.

It's not a good bargain.

First -- let me note that I love the site rferl.org  I'm one of its most faithful readers. I view it at least twice a day or more both for work and for my own personal  edification, following various stories around the world and I will go on doing this avidly. I used to work as a freelancer with two weekly publications and a dedicated page at RFE/RL in 2002-2004 and I have continued to contribute occasionally.  After a long day of working at other things, I make the time to read and provide substantive, intelligent, useful comments on the RFE/RL blog pages under my own name.

Actually, I'm one of a small number of people who do that.  Most of the people who put in comments are anonymous; many of them are drive-by haters that still get published because RFE/RL is pretty tolerant of First Amendment level speech.

Yet the intellectual circles of people I know who read and comment and hold conferences on these issues covered by RFE/RL aren't bothering to comment there -- that's because they don't like the brevity and seeming superficiality of comments, I guess, and also fear being flamed or getting into flame wars (there is so much fear on the Internet!). I never see ANY of my colleagues there from any organization or media outlet; I never see any of my extended network of colleagues and friends. Very, very seldom. They are on Facebook or Twitter or even very occasionally on the New York Times or The Guardian or Moscow News. But not there.

So the level of contributions are generally low. They are facile anti-American haters, grotesque Serbian, Russian, etc. nationalists and young people not burdened with any special knowledge of history or even geography. Only someone passionately following the issues such as me would bother to show up for this setting. There are a relative few number of us, and we enhance what is otherwise a bleak discourse of frequently uneducated, unintelligible and extreme commentators without accountability.

Why go on doing this when the editors and writers never, ever talk to you? I ask this not only about rferl.org; I increasingly ask it about any page I visit and comment on frequently.

About a year ago, an RFE/RL editor asked me to contribute to the blogs that were being started -- like all web sites there had to be blogs to keep the audience coming back, as the straight news story seldom seems to get an attentive audience anymore. I was invited to do this on the basis of comments I made; these were either then published as blogs or I lengthened them out to posts.

When you contribute to the blogs there, you are not paid. If an editor commissions a story for me in the other sections, then you are paid the standard fee, and I've published those kinds of pieces, too.

But even really deeply-researched and well-reasoned and deeply expert articles like this one on Facebook which come from years in the TOS debate trenches are at the end of the day "only a blog". And I find that the link to my own blog on a piece like that -- even a piece kept for days on the front page because it has had tens of thousands of viewers -- might only deliver 25-100 clicks to my own blog. Not really worth the trouble, in some respects. I'm supposed to be flattered that I'm even able to publish with the grown-ups and the real journalists; I'm supposed to look for this opportunity and shut up about any concerns I have about the basic unfairness of it. And increasingly, I'm not finding that such a grand bargain.

There's something else I realized about all this, however, at rferl.org, which is funded by the U.S. Congress. Unlike the New York Times, the news stories, never, ever have comments open. Maybe that's to keep the surgical space of the news operation sanitized; maybe it's to avoid the endless stupid comments that pile up and distract from the facts, but it's frustrating.

On the blogs, the comments are open. But the authors never, ever, ever answer the comments. They never descend from their Olympian heights as staff editors to talk in the comments. Ever. In their lives. (I suspect among the reasons besides elitism, which is a factor, is lack of time, because they are given these blog spaces to do "in their free time" to keep them interested in what otherwise might be the drudgery of classic news writing work, which is a chore).

But...Hey. It's so different than, say, Fred Wilson at A VC, who takes the time every day to answer dozens of people in the comments with at least a short phrase or sentence even though with his multimillion investments, he's got to be a bit busier than an RFE/RL editor. It's so different than even the New York Times writers who at least *rarely* descend from *their* Olympian perches to mix it up in the comments (if only to correct "someone who is wrong on the Internet").

Or take The Atlantic or TechCrunch, where you can rely on Alex Madrigal or MC Siegler or even Michael Arrington, also busy, to come down in the comments.

It's the cutting-edge norm now. Blog shorter on Tumblr if you have to; blog only on Twitter; but at least interact with your readers! This is social media! Yet for those trying to be cutting edge and have Twitter and blogs at RFE/RL, there's never a comment to the comments...Ever.

So I realized something about this. It's really, really demeaning. It really trivializes you. You are always just denigrated to someone who sounds off in the comments. You are never referenced. You are never cited. You never count (if you don't have a tech or academic credential). So...why should you be there toiling in their CMS mills? Why add to the page hits from other readers who come to argue with you if no one else will? Why chip ya nails?

At least on your own blog, you don't have to fit into the word count limit. You don't have to type in a stupid CAPTCHA in nearly  invisible grey typeface over and over to get it to work. And you don't have to risk losing all your work if you hit the CLOSE by accident because the SEND is right next to it (the interface of this CSM is totally non-user friendly).

On your own blog, you can write as you please -- and sure, maybe nobody wants to read your 2000 or 3000 words instead of 450. Der, I get all that. *But at least you are in Google*. They might skim. They might find something of use. In a comments template on a CMS, in the little box at the bottom on a blog comments managing system *you are not indexed in Google*. You might as well be invisible, after the day's newspaper is thrown away, figuratively speaking.

So, with these circumstances, I'm done for the duration writing comments on RFE/RL blogs or stories. If I have a comment on the material there, I will put it on this blog or one of my others, and link to the column. Sure, I lose the opportunity then to put a comment that links back to my blog at the very least, but since that delivers little satisfaction in terms of readers anyway, why not put it in Twitter were people really do interact with you in real time and you can also chose to follow the non-anonymous?

I find that if I put a comment on a high-trafficked page like Communty at New York Times or The Atlantic, sure, I get some people who will come and read my blog. But I'm never going to be GIGAOM here and don't care if I have only a small readership. Twitter and Facebook deliver many more readers these days. I'm amazed whenever I go to meetings and conferences at how many people are actually reading anyway.

Despite the declaration that blogs are dead, I'm going to be reviewing all the places I comment with this CMS serf problem in mind, and shrink back to my own blog.

The Tangled Web

Here we go again with the Tangled Web weaving and deceiving again. And flogging the Berkman Center perspective again (Global Voices is a project originally created and supported by Berkman and then sort of spun off).

And I have to put it that bluntly. Because it is a deception to imply that only authoritarians win, and activists are only at their helpless mercy. You would think if Belarus and Libya can't teach us that for now, at least Tunisia and Egypt would (and even Azerbaijan, quite frankly, where a concerted campaign to free imprisoned bloggers finall paid off).

Why so harsh? Because at this point it's a wilful, deliberate refusal to even *reference* any other point of view now, and it's a deliberate flogging and reflogging of one perspective that works like this:

1) technology is all-powerful

2) all-powerful authoritarian and even totalitarian governments use it for evil ends

3) even our liberal society with its free enterprise and corporations have seen government and corporations using this all-powerful technology to track us "like" Big Brother

4) therefore...therefore...we must all shut up and listen to our betters in the transnational wired elite who will run things for us, do all the driving for us, and point out to us the error of our silly socializing ways.

Even the blogger referenced in this post, Onnik Krikorian, feels he has to come and leave a comment that corrects the harshness of the Tangled Web's indictment from the technological elite -- those who have the tools of media and new media (twitter, blogs, attached to high-traffic news sites) and can keep perpetuating this perspective unchallenged.

I oppose anonymous accounts on Facebook. First of all, they are no protection, really. If you are trying to be anonymous on the Internet -- that huge, transparent, tracking open boulevard of the Metaverse -- you will be found out, eventually. Even if your ISP doesn't track to your building; even if the hash marks of your computer doesn't track to your house; even if your social gestures of photos and geolocating services don't do it; even if your linguistic patterns don't do it, when the secret police come in the door, unless you were really smart and flashdrived yourselve one step ahead of them, they may find an application open; they may find Firefox helpfully "remembered" the password because you clicked "yes" to get rid of its annoying query; and if they fail to get it all those ways, there's the sort of thing I heard about at the CPJ 30th anniversary celebration last night from a CPJ executive -- an Iranian blogger who had described hearing the person in the next prison cell being tortured to give their Facebook and Twitter log-on and password.

Do you think it mattered whether your account was anonymous or identified when you are tortured for your password?

So yeah, I do get it about why people need to be anonymous, but I want to emphasize once again: there's something to be said even in the harsh conditions of Iran or Belarus or Sudan for *not* being anonymous, and it's important to remember that their are journalists and bloggers and human rights activists who are not anonymous. They try to use the old concepet of "publicity as the best method" and try to make visibility and international recognition in particular work for them. And one thing they do is make friends on Facebook with real people and real identities and talk to them. And they know the risks and they know that certain kinds of communications can harm them -- let's say they are caught making plans to have lunch with a National Security Council official on a wall comment.

But at the end of the day there are indeed people who value openness and identity (versus conspiracy and covert action and anonymity) and it has indeed been a hall-mark of civic movements of conscience using peaceful methods. That doesn't mean that everything these very public activists do is in public; they have to use a certain amount of sensible tradecraft not to "make it easier" for the secret police. Yet being anonymous on Facebook is *not* something they all require; just because *some* do in *some* situations. It has not been their demand.

You know who I first learned this concept really deeply from? Not just Russians and Belarusians, who come from a different tradition of the openness of the Soviet dissident movement. I learned it from Iranians. Even an Iranian journalist who had to speak at a meeting without giving her name had this tip for those of us concerned to get accurate information (given the pollution of the information stream with secret police disinformers, regime plants, etc.). She said follow this person or that person or ask if this or that person will friend you on Facebook, because inside a group of friends and or a Facebook-made group, you can be more assured that you are talking to real people and not secret police plants. Again, it is not the technologists banal 0/1 binary 100 percent -- always used as an argument against common sense -- (therefore accounting for their insistence on the anonymous track); but it *mitigates* the secret police problem. Even on a page in Facebook with all open identities, the person continuing to carry the regime's water, say, regarding Belarus, has to have a Google footprint. They have to link their awful words to their real-life identity, professions, reputations, businesses. And that's all good. That's not Orwell; that's accountability. Accountability among peers in a setting where people's solidarity can thrive. And that is all that has ever defeated authoritarian regimes -- media, new or old, only mediates.

This continual harping on the notion that regimes are exploiting Facebook expression (and therefore pouring water on the mill of the anonymous accounts lobby, and pouring water on the mill of the Morozov-type cyber-skepticism) obdurately overlooks the fact that people still use Facebook to gain solidarity with their faces.

In a world that has utterly ignored the suffering of Belarus (except for a few articles in the New York Times on the Belarus Free Theater), and has gone stampeding off to fawn over revolutions in the Middle East that feed into their anti-American stereotypes (even if some deservedly so), it's been heartening to see groups on Facebook 2,000 and 3,000 strong supporting Belarus; friendship groups and chats within my own friends list daily trying to deliver news and views and solidarity; Twitter, Live Journal, and blogs all trying to keep this subject alive. When I think of what we had in 1995 when Lukashenka first began to crack down on journalists, which was just a handful of human rights activists and some State Department and OSCE officials, it's very heartening even given the bleak picture. A widening circle of exiles, diaspora, professionals, journalists, just ordinary people learning about events online can start to try to accomplish things. One thousand or even only one hundred on a petition sounds pathetic, but not when you consider -- again -- that 10 and 20 years ago there were only our letters with a few signatures, and nothing else, it's something.

Why is there such concerted resistance to the idea that public activism even by people gravely at risk, and the walled garden of the Facebook friends' list and the Facebook invite-only group are valid forms of activism that can and should and will continue despite the risks of secret police exploiting it?

I think there's a reason for this. I think the people advocating this in fact have never worked in civic movements. They've never been in NGOs. Or they've been in them briefly, largely online, and find them disappointing or the fix to be had from them not quick enough to sustain their egos. Or, if they have actually participated in a cause, they don't use Facebook, or  use it only as a number of tools by contrast with things like Tor or IRC or Twitter or Gtalk that they use much, much more. Indeed, the leftists hate "the walled garden" of Facebook and scorn its silly games and pictures of cats and finds it "bourgeois". That's why their insistence on nerfing it to their own preferences for covert instead of overt action are pretty disingenuous. They're not customers -- yet they want to impose a regime on the rest of the customers.

Funny example. I noted to Jillian York, who is the most vocal proponent of the anonymous accounts on Facebook, that she has no visible Facebook account. All she has is one of those public "fan" pages where her adoring fans can come and post "luvyas" and "likes" to her posting of links to her blogs.

Whereupon she tweeted to me that she's blocked me on Facebook so that's why I can't see her. Bingo. That proves my point precisely. If you want to make a secure little organizing group of your trusted friends and comrades, you don't need to be anonymous. You can first of all make sure everyone in your enclave shuts down their FB visibility, closing all the levers and sliders on it, and second of all, block anyone you don't want to see you, who you suspect of being regime watchers or sympathizers, or people whose criticism scares you. Once safe in your Facebook nest, if you don't want to trade Farmville tips and pictures of your kids' birthdays, you can trade tactics for how to overthrow the regime. Of course, gmail and gtalk and groups and all the other "gs" of Google might be a better and less accidently visible set of tools.

Jillian refuses to accept that, however, because she wants it both ways: she wants anonymity; she wants to block whom she hates; yet she wants maximum visibility to the world at large to influence them with her perspective. She wants maximum influence with minimum accountability for herself and her friends. Even when these people are public figures, they want to block anyone who is critical of them from seeing their actions.

If you happen to criticize such an awful, sordid little orthodoxy -- a vivid form of Orwellianism in our time -- then she will call you a "bully" on Twitter to her thousands of followers. Here's an affluent and influential woman in a Harvard think-tank, publishing in mainstream media and also with a highly-visible blog and many Twitter followers, involved in various projects sustained by the media giants of our time, and she can find a freelancer with 700 Twitter followers and a small blog like mine "a bully". One has to roll one's eyes 360 degrees in their sockets.

When you are dealing with people like Jillian York -- people unconscionably willing to call others "bullies" or "trolls" or worse because you persistently and legitimately criticize them -- you hope the editors of RFE/RL, which is a decent organization, would grasp that and at least reference a range of views on an issue.

It is not to be, however; we have had a steady stream of one blog after another touting only the Berkman lobbying line on this (which Sen. Durbin has adopted) -- and that's it.

I called the editor of the blog Luke Allnutt out on this on Twitter -- it was a compressed Twitter communication that I later sent a longer email to unpack but it amounts to this: 1) male technologists with technology credentials get referenced; 2) female bloggers, if they have Harvard in their name get referenced. Others don't. That would be me, a middle-aged female blogger and freelancer with no technology or academic credentials, only lots of field experience.

And while social media is supposed to "empower" people like me with real experience, and it is supposed to sort of "level the playing field" so that our voices can be heard, at least as a minority -- it doesn't really work that way.

So I'm done playing serf content-producer in this Content Management System.

 

Why Westboro Matters

I was glad to see the Supreme Court ruling in the Westboro case involving an extremist hate-group that pickets soldiers' funerals, screaming a message about God's supposed retribution against our men at arms for America's toleration of homosexuality.

I'm glad to see the substance and essence of this decision, which isn't about approval of hate speech, but upholding of the principles of the First Amendment.

Our First Amendment is indeed a tattered thing these days online, where we are all subject to not only restrictiv­e and arbitrary Terms of Service, but the ministrati­ons of hordes of moderators­, filterers, and censors, all of whom wave the flag of "civility" and who urge everyone "not to feed trolls" but who more often than not merely stifle dissent.

Thank God in real organic life offline, at least, the concept still holds, and there is hope to provide a greater space and a market in gradations of First-Amen­dment level services on the Internet some day.

It's common among the geek set now to claim that Westboro isn't about speech or faith, but about lawsuit damages trolling. It doesn't matter. If that's the case, the bad-faith exploitati­on of the law can be explored in a separate civil lawsuit; the father of the dead soldier also wanted $5 million for his pain, and deserved it, unlike Westboro.

Indeed, I see the tech blogosphere ramping up this "logical" and "economically-determinist" argument so that they don't have to concede the First Amendment issue at hand, and can distract -- one again -- from their hackers' culture of freedom of speech for me, not for thee.

Why is it a good thing to be able to tolerate horrible speech like this? Judge Alito, in a dissenting opinion, spoke for many a net nanny and many a forums marm when he said, "“In order to have a society in which public issues can be openly and vigorously debated,” he wrote, “it is not necessary to allow the brutalization of innocent victims.”

I'm all for stopping the brutalization of innocent victims -- when we are in communities of consensus, with likeminded people who can agree what is brutalization, what is innocent, and what is a victim. That there is too much bad will and bad faith online about these very definitions means I'd prefer to have the First Amendment, thanks. There are a good many people trying to control speech on the Internet now --frankly, I view the efforts of various congressmen now, ginned up by the wired left, to impose the right to anonymous accounts on Facebook, as just such a control of speech -- and control of freedom of association which shouldn't be acceptable.

 

The Westboro case points to a world in which the religious right -- even in its extreme forms -- if it is not violent, cannot be filtered or silenced by the liberal center and secular left. It also points to a world where homosexuals, even in insisting rightfully for their rights, including gay marriage (which I uphold), cannot impose norms of politically-correct speech to achieve by culture what they cannot achieve by law. Those two forces -- the organized LGBT movement and the organized secular leftist "civility" movement -- have made powerful inroads on people's ability to express what they think and have obtained enormous power in many online settings. The understandable and legitimate sentiment of wishing to promote liberalism and deter hate speech have led in some cases to the kind of chill on speech that the left always invokes if a corporation or a rich man or a church imposes on them, but which it is not willing to concede for groups it doesn't agree with.

As so many things in life, Second Life has had a microcosm of this Westboro story. Joshua McCracken, a 20-something AIDS patient in Georgia, made a youtube accusing me of insensitivity, trolling, abuse, etc. because I questioned his claim that he was infected with HIV when he first made it.

Why didn't I believe someone who said they had AIDS? What, I was cold and cruel and hard-hearted? No, I was just a reporter on the online world of Second Life. And I observed how this individual, as leader of a racist and obscene group called the Patriotic Nigras, part of the online Anonymous movement, and affiliated with Woodbury University, would endlessly grief me and others in Second Life with outrageous spam, ugly and obscene pictures, etc. that would crash servers. A typical texture spammed through self-replicating objects with particles says in big letters BIG NIGGER DICK; another one says AIDS; it is a popular meme of the Anonymous set online to talk about how something (like a public pool) is supposedly infected with AIDS; that somebody is spreading AIDS; that people have AIDS, etc. etc. It's an obsession of theirs. Racist jokes involving the images of black men are also part of their shtick. I believe they're entitled to their free speech with these images and ideas and actions. I just don't believe they get to deliver it to my simulator (my web site) coercively and forcibly and then effectively ban me from the use of my server by crashing it. That's all.

But that simple position -- and the simple factural reporting on it -- causes a fake hysteria to be whipped up by the Anonymous set and they begin to describe anyone pointing out these obvious "Golden Rule" ethics that they are "butthurt" or are "trolling" or are "cat ladies". That's how they do it.

They do it "for the lulz," and as Joshua McCracken wrote famously, they do it because it's just so much fun to watching people get upset. It's a malicious form of glee.

I didn't focus much on this person or his movement -- it was one of a number of such groups working with the Anonymous franchise, as it were, and I would abuse-report it. Soon, McCracken was staging another typical stunt -- saying he was ending his griefing career, retiring his boxes of Mario and Bill Cosby and aborted fetus particle-spamming devices, and going to "go straight". He began a series of reflective articles and also wrote a sensational tell-all that he had fallen in love with the female avatar of Mark McCahill of Duke University, known as Pixeleen Mistral in Second Life, editor of a popular tabloid about the world online. When he found out that "she" was in fact a "he," he became distressed and began to wonder if he were gay, and began to experiment with this notion in various gay clubs. There, he contracted HIV, got very sick very quickly, and was dead in a matter of a year.

When he made the film, it wasn't believable for several reasons: a) it seemed like he was exploiting the Anonymous meme once again -- an AIDS texture; b) it seemed impossible that he was saying he had little time to live in this day and age, when HIV infection is treated very effectively and people live for years with HIV positive status; c) it seemed odd, that if he really was so sick, that he'd be chosing to spend his time online arguing with strangers, and not with his family.

Later, it turned out that the only video his poor mother had of her unfortunate son was this video of him ranting at me for not believing him. He could have spent his time making more personal videos about more positive things; he didn't.

When an NYU student claimed that he had already died (he hadn't; he was just weeks from the end of his life) and I didn't find any obituary, I wrote one blog post indicating skepticism, and when the official notice of his death was claimed, I researched it by calling the funeral home. This very basic journalistic work earned me shrieks of hatred, hate mail, and forums abuse -- although it was the sort of thing any reporter, especially one covering the anonymous, abusive world of Second Life, would want to do.

But there were also a few quiet emails and direct messages on Youtube from people telling me that they were glad I had covered the short career of this abusive man accurately, because he had harmed a number of people. He was a public figure; I had the right to discuss his life; I had the right to inquire about his claims. Yet many people in this hothouse, closeknit community didn't think I did, and were prepared to write the most vile horrible stuff about me, including a creepy ghoul named Rev. Jim Jesus, who stalks me, makes fake accounts with my picture, and so on.

Awful speech is awful; I have never known it to be fixed by censoring or oppressing or even jailing those who utter awful things. They only get worse; they only then justify their awfulness by your mistreatment.

The quest for civility cannot begin with remonstrations from church ladies or the opposite (but symbiotic twin) of church ladies in our time, secular forums moderators. The quest for civility first has to come in a debate about definitions and a debate about facts. You cannot trust a shrill wired left that has claimed that Tea Party members are guilty of murder for their use of metaphors to be the custodians of civility -- not when they condone one using subterfuge to call up a governor and trick him into incriminating speech; not when their followers shout hateful things at film crews.

And debate away all you like, but the Supreme Court rulings stand, and the definitions are liberal and broad -- you can criticize a whole host of things, including the government and various people and power, and all their efforts in the world to call you a "troll" or "guilty of ad hominem attacks" don't amount to anything.

If you don't like the free speech of others, you can retreat to your little Facebook set, lock down all the settings, and chose your friends and our IM partners very carefully. You can block on Twitter or you can go on Google or Yahoo Groups. There's lots of ways you can ensure that you never have to hear a discouraging word or never have to tolerate a view you don't like. What you don't get to do is impose this net-nannying -- the modern equivalent of the Communications Decency Act that in fact the leftists like John Perry Barlow have brought into being -- on the public commons in real life.

Regrettably,  by proxy, you can still do this on most big public platforms. Not always so easily -- Facebook has its tolerance of Holocaust denial and its tolerance of nationalisms although it draws the line against anti-LGBT speech -- thereby indicating the hypocrisy and the arbitrariness of letting geeks define your public space for you.

Regretably, there is a time bomb within this decision waiting to come to an Internet near you. Says the Times:

Justice Stephen G. Breyer joined the majority opinion but wrote separately to say that other sorts of speech, including television broadcasts and Internet postings, might warrant different treatment.

No, they don't. Shield your eyes through the ample tools of selection, mute, and filtering already available; pick and chose your groups and communities; or don't go online, in the end. But imposing subjective notions of civility is a recipe for disaster that neither brings the civility it seeks nor inspires civility in dissenters who are suppressed.

We need a market online in varying degrees of First-Amendment-level services, in which the government never interferes, except for the protection of minors against exploitation of pornography as already stipulated under law.

 

We don't need any new laws; we don't need any new policies. We have one. It is a Supreme Court decision.  This is why we have separation of powers and checks and balances, to uphold the spirit of the Constitution.