Tech President has a profile of Mike Masnick of TechDirt by Sarah Lai Stirland today, styling him as some brave Internet freedom fighter, battling evil RIAA, Hollywood, K-Street content company lobbyists, blah blah. But we know him as just the tribal leader of the copyleftists, who has toiled away in relative tech blog obscurity, even with his jillion visitors and commenters, and may only get his 15 minutes of fame as long as attention focuses on SOPA and not, oh, gay marriage or something.
Stirland's Tech President piece is interesting, nevertheless, after you discount the hagiography around Masnick, for laying out yet another version of the myth of how "the Internet" rose up and opposed SOPA "democratically". It's fascinating to see how different the versions are even on the usual echo-chambering tech press. Back in February, Masnick was denying that it was Google's lobbyists who could take credit, and claimed there was a grassroots surge. He cited in turn likeminded Leslie Harris from the Center for Democracy and Technology who claimed the campaign "was not a command and control operation. Don't believe the claim that Google (or anyone else) orchestrated all these efforts."
The MPAA disagrees, obviously, seeing it as a Google-orchestrated campaign, and with tekkie literalism, Harris can say, "This is flatly wrong and puts the lack of understanding about how the Internet works on full display."
Oh, please. Do you take us all for children?! Let me explain to you "how the Internet works". The "Internet works" the same way everything else works: a) influence b) money. And in this case, it's Mitch Kapor's influence, and Mitch Kapor's money -- melded now with money from George Soros, given to EFF and related organizations. That's ultimately what is back of the whole copyleftist movement that began this struggle years ago, and it's not a conspiracy theory to point out how the seeds planted have now grown fruit.
Computer World's Grant Gross asks "who really was behind" the protests, and concludes that it wasn't the tech firms and wasn't just some authentic new grass roots, either.
The first narrative, that giant tech companies drove the uprising, has little basis in fact, according to several people who helped organize the protest. The second storyline, that the protests bubbled up from regular Internet users, comes closer to explaining the phenomenon, but reality is more complicated, participants said.
The protests were a combination of independent decisions by websites including Wikipedia and Reddit to go black on Jan. 18, behind-the-scenes organization by a number of groups, and grassroots response to the blackout and other online efforts, participants said.
FIGHT FOR THE FUTURE
Gross then quotes two people:
"What we're seeing here is this integration of the organizations with [Washington] expertise, and these organizations that are very plugged into these user-driven social networks," said Harold Feld, legal director of Public Knowledge, one of several groups that worked behind the scenes on the protest.
Fight for the Future, a fledgling group started in late 2011, plans to build on the SOPA protest model to draw together a network of websites to form an "Internet defense league" to contact Congress about future bills that threaten Web freedoms, said Tiffiniy Cheng, cofounder of Fight for the Future and OpenCongress.org, a congressional watchdog site
Gross quotes the SOPA loser Rupert Murdoch as blaming big tech companies in a tweet, and notes that Google galvanized 7 million signatories to its petition campaign. He also concedes, "It's also true that many blogs, including the crusading TechDirt, drummed up opposition to the bills." But he's still eager to give voice to the "grassroots" legend, and not surprisingly, finds CDT to pitch that version of the story:
The characterization of the protests as a top-down effort is wrong, said Mark Stanley, new media coordinator at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a digital rights group that helped organize the protest. "That's just such a mischaracterization of what happened," he said. "This was definitely the Internet community at large.
Feld said there was a key list of 100 organizers:
The email list included members of Fight for the Future, Public Knowledge, CDT, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, Mozilla and Demand Progress, a liberal civil liberties group, participants said.
So wait. I thought you said this was "grassroots"? But it's the same old cadres in the same old copyleftist campaign groups, some of them very ancient liks FSF and EFF, and some of them merely the new boiler-room website pages created by EFF protege.
Cory Doctorow's Boingboing.net blogs on the "secret history" of the anti-SOPA movement referencing Talking Points Memo, "How the Web Killed SOPA and PIPA".
TPM thinks "Blackout Day" -- when high school kids doing homework were suddenly deprived of Wikipedia -- was pivotal, but then found this:
But after speaking with various people involved in the debate — including those in Congress, those on the side of the Web companies who criticized the bills, and those in online advocacy groups — TPM has learned that there were several other pivotal moments as well.
“There was sustained effort for the past three months,” said Tiffiniy Cheng, co-founder of Fight For the Future, an online advocacy non-profit that was founded in mid-2011 with a grant from the Media Democracy Fund, itself a fund-raising and distribution organization founded in 2006 “on the belief that freedom of expression and access to information are basic human rights.”
Fight for the Future played an early leading role in coordinating the various websites and groups opposed to SOPA and PIPA into a cohesive coalition.
SILICON VALLEY ECHO CHAMBER
There follows a good exegesis of how the Silicon Valley echo chamber works, with the creation of a separate killer SEO site -- and we're back full circle to Boing Boing:
“There were 4 million people on AmericanCensorship.com during the markup hearing,” on November 16, Cheng told TPM. “That was a pivotal moment. Sites like Boing Boing and Mozilla and many other websites, an Internet grassroots, began waking up. It was an amazing day.”
MITCH KAPOR
Doctorow then helpfully explains that Cheng comes from Downhill Battle, a group formed in 2003 basically to fight the record industry and campaign aggressively for file-sharing and breaking copyright. And with a little research, you can find who formed Downhill Battle: Mitch Kapor.
Yes, that Mitch Kapor from Second Life's board. It always comes back to Mitch, doesn't it! He seems quiet -- he's stopped blogging and rarely tweets -- and it's hard to conceive of Mitch as really being "behind everything". But he is. Simply by founding and funding a few organizations and their web page spin offs and then networking with them behind the scenes. Each and every one of these properties in the network can whiplash thousands and then tens of thousands and then millions of people who do nothing but retweet
This isn't about grassroots; it isn't about anything except mass propaganda of the sort that was practiced by tyrants in the 1930s. Of course, there is every effort to try to dress it up for the cyber age: "Feld, from Public Knowledge, called the group the "future of cloud civic engagement."
Er, cloud civic engagement? These are just the same old hardened and seasoned cadres who have been fighting copyright ever since Kapor cashed out from the failing Lotus 1-2-3, which was unusable software that only nerds learned how to use, and began to fret about how software needed to be open and free. The rest is history.
Feld cleverly crafts the slogans on his Public Knowledge site to make it sound as if they are for "balanced copyright" and "lawful" use of technology, but he's consciously collaborating with people who have far more radical beliefs, like Cheng.
Cheng tries to portray this very old-style cadre-run front organization as authentic.
The interaction on the leaderless list was an "amazing phenomenon" that led to widespread collaboration, said Cheng, from Fight for the Future. The list was "both organized and very open and distributed," she said.
Leaderless? But that's silly. This is a collectivized set of cadres who are already like-minded and function with the usual one or two tribal leaders in fact showing up and doing all the work with some deliberation by "democratic centralism". Note that even the tech bloggers covering this speak of this work as "behind the scenes". "Open and distributed" -- to those willing to go along with the program, who are already in the in-group for years.
Of course at some point the cadres, after they decided everything (they always do!), had to open up the template for replication. Reddit was needed to boost the cadres' action from the thousands to the millions -- it's the critical junction. "There was some "very informal" contact between the advocacy groups and Reddit, said Erik Martin, general manager of the participatory news site." Of course.
Then Wikipedia came in -- the final elephant stampeded (I've always pointed out that they are a walled garden, not part of the open Internet because no link every takes you outside of their servers, and they do not have social media devices like "like" or "tweet" on their site). This line is among the more hilarious -- Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, describing how he authentically joined the fray: "The blackout had a grassroots beginning, Wales said. "As I'm an individual, it doesn't get any more grassroots than that."
Yeah, I'll say.
"CAME OUT OF NOWHERE"
Masnick also pushes this utterly fake version of "the grassroots" -- with even more prevarication than any of the others above, as Stirland describes on Tech President:
But he expresses a strong belief in a "bottom-up strategy," of letting good ideas bubble up from Internet freedom advocates at critical moments.
As an example, he points to Fight for the Future, a small non-profit run by Tiffiniy Cheng and Holmes Wilson in Western Massachusetts who coordinated a number of high-profile campaigns against SOPA.
"Those guys were amazing," he marvels. "They had ideas. Those were two people in Western Massachusetts who came out of nowhere. In some ways those guys were naive and they actually thought that SOPA could be stopped. I didn't think it could be stopped."
Well, go back to BoingBoing, and learn that Cheng and Wilson did not at all "come out of nowhere" and isn't just some little scrappy nonprofit in Western Massachusets so "naive" as to think she could stop SOPA.
As Doctorow notes, she was previously active in Downhill Battle. As we learn from Wiretap, Chen was born in Macau (China), suffered in a famine, fled as refugees with her parents, and had a difficult life. Her interview tell the story, and lets us know that like some Russian and Cuban emigres who came here as children, they don't necessarily share the anti-communism their parents may have felt, or somehow channel the communism of their grandparents, to come up with a critical posture toward America:
My grandparents were the victims of the largest famine in the world, which happened in China. And my father was an orphan. And my mother was very poor too, and her parents just died from overwork. We were also affected by the Vietnam war, and I was born in Macau [China] in a refugee camp. And we were then sponsored to come to this country. So, all of that makes me value being political. Seeing a system like ours that can alleviate some poverty makes me want to do something. But when you have excessive growth at the corporate level, you really see a distortion of our political system, and our economy.
[Interviewer] How so?
Then the corporations just have so much money and so many connections to the political system. Then they are allowed to influence some of the most important decisions. There are some people who have a bunch of political power because of the money they are allowed to make. And then there is the public that can never gain that much political power individually.
Yes, by now you have figured out that Ms. Cheng is active in Occupy Wall Street, and even has a big plan -- and yet another website called A New Way Forward! -- to break up the banks, which were too big to fail, and therefore should be broken up. And here you can find long-time progressive organizer and writer Danny Schecter gushing:
"This bottom-up anarchist sensibility and ideology conflicts with the mass mobilizations of old where an organization issues a call and a coalition of groups carries it out."
Well, how, exactly Danny?
It sure doesn't look that way, from everything I've just read and reiterated here. In fact, it looks like it works exactly like the old 1930s style mass organizations with the mass agitation and propaganda! A small group of cadres who are highly seasoned and organized and resourced -- Mitch Kapor and friends -- get together and decide the party line. They canvas all their front groups and get them all resonating with the same message like parrots. Where's the bottom-up stuff? In fact, where's the anarchy? (It's bureaucratic centralism, unleashing anarchy on other people.)
POPULAR FRONT
As you can see, a lot is accomplished through the front sites. They're the digital equivalents of storefronts or boiler rooms where lots of people are agitated to come and look at giant, very simplistic dumbed-down visuals like a giant Powerpoint with minimal text, and click, click, click -- either a petition, or a viral spread of the campaign to all their friends. They are designed to hold people for the one-three minutes that they may remain on a site -- and that's it. No other information; no debate.
I've watched "community organizers" among the "progressives" work this sort of system like clockwork. First, register a site with a big, bold name like "www.stampedetheelephants.net" with simplistic grey-red-black-white (socialism) or light green and brown graphics (Islam) colour schemes or even just blue, cyan, white (Internet). Under 'about us," don't put any actual names (look on Fight for the Future and you won't find any, anywhere), but put clarion mission statements like "We are free people freeing the elephants, freely" and be sure to put a "Creative Commons" license at the bottom.
Next, put up a few really scary factoids, like "Unless we stampede the elephants, the planet will die" and then find one or two entities to blame: "Evil gameskeepers are preventing the elephants from stampeding" and then finish up with a utopian flourish, "If all of us get together, we can stampede the elephants and make a better world" -- and then have several giant buttons leading to petitions, and pre-fabricated letters to congress people, and then of course, some social media buttons for "sharing".
Any young kid stampeded himself to this way-station on the Internet between the TechDirt article or the Reddit forums or Facebook, will not care who organized the site, who pays for it, what it really stands for -- it's just a vague "place" where he can "do something" and feel good -- click on a petition and copy to Twitter and move on.
AMERICAN CENSORSHIP
Anybody typing in words like "stampeding elephants" will find this SEO-friendly website immediately. Like americancensorship.com
Here's what Chen had to say about her site and the "grassroots" whipped up with it, according to TPM:
That coalition, which ended up including upwards of 70 different companies and advocacy groups — From Tumblr to Demand Progress to Don’t Censor the Net — first took shape as a coalition in November 2011 under the banner “American Censorship,” just in time to rally opponents ahead of the House Judiciary Committee’s first hearing on SOPA.
At the time, the “American Censorship” website encouraged opponents of SOPA to “censor” or “blackout” their own logos in opposition of the bill by using a few lines of code the group offered online. Several notable websites followed suit on November 16, the day of the first hearing on SOPA.
“There were 4 million people on AmericanCensorship.com during the markup hearing,” on November 16, Cheng told TPM. “That was a pivotal moment. Sites like Boing Boing and Mozilla and many other websites, an Internet grassroots, began waking up. It was an amazing day.”
Of course, Demand Progress is just another one of the same kind of boiler-room sites. A site with hardly any content, and merely glorification of Aaron Swartz, who was under investigation for a massive heist of JSTOR publications and breaking and entering a college library, but the case doesn't seem to be mentioned anymore.
MIRO MIRO
What was Kapor working on with Cheng back in the mid years of the last decade?
Well, Kapor had an idea, after he had launched Second Life and guess found it wanting, to create what he called "Democracy TV" (DTV) and later "Miro"". In 2005, the Boston Phoenix reported:
DTV’s full launch, under a top-secret new name, is slated for the coming weeks. After that? "I think there’s going to be an absolute explosion of user-produced video and content," says Mitch Kapor. "People’s content. Look at what happened with blogs. Some of it will be junk, but some of it will be really interesting." And, as viewers are more easily able to produce and watch interesting independently produced content, "the whole idea [of] television will begin to change significantly.
Well, yeah. There was an explosion. Just not on his opensource software platform. The explosion was on Youtube, which was proprietary, and was later purchased by Google.
But at the time, the gleam was still in the eye, and Kapor created the Participatory Culture Foundation, and put up $50,000, and also recruited Andy and Deborah Rappaport, "huge donors to progressive causes" who then "decided to fund the DTV project 'on the spot' when PCF members flew to San Francisco to make their case last January.
Here's more of a statement on something from Mitch Kapor than you'll ever find about Second Life -- we were all wondering what he was doing back in 2005 instead of overseeing Linden Lab, but that's because we didn't read the back pages of the Boston Phoenix:
"They’re attempting to build the infrastructure and applications over the Internet that will eventually supplant broadcast and cable television," Kapor says. "That’s a pretty big project. Pretty important, culturally." And while he allows that it "won’t happen overnight," he’s excited about the PCF’s attempt to democratize this new medium. "They really get the vision. DTV is this end-to-end system that makes it easy to publish, and easy to consume and subscribe to videos. It’s so much the right thing. And they’re doing it in an open-source, nonprofit kind of way, which I think is the right way to do it."
The non-profit was the Participatory Culture Foundation:
The core members of the PCF — Nicholas Reville, 26, Tiffiniy Cheng, 25, Holmes Wilson, 25, and Nick Nassar, 24 — are also the founders of anti-music-industry activist group Downhill Battle.
Miro never got that popular compared to Hulu. In 2007, Gizmodo reviewed it and other similar programs that were basically for ripping TV and movies and watching them and editing and mixing and matching them -- in other words, illegal activity. Gizmodo explains that outright, and even says that Miro was the most problematic of those reviewed because it had virtually no lawful content on it of its own and essentially expected the user to go out and slurp up the illegal content -- under the fiction that he was going to create his own content.
The notion that people were "participating" and "creating their own videos" was a kind of nice fiction that never took off, given the usual power curve. Maybe there is some Miro community somewhere still -- have you ever heard of it? But right around this time there was other competition even to Youtube -- Loic LeMeur's Seesmic, a video uploading and sharing site also steeped in betterworlding, but which had to morph into something different when the recession hit.
Miro -- or any other TV software -- didn't seem to be the world-changing ap that Kapor hoped for. Maybe because people keep persisting and downloading porn and illegal movies and don't create those earnest home-made films about workers and peasants and bringing in the harvest that he'd like to see.
PHONE HOME
There's more about Miro -- of the sort of story that will be all too familiar to Second Life users. It turned out that this lovely free and open software Miro had a backdoor in it, and had an installer of a program called OpenCandy which made "offers" -- but which also phoned home the user data.
This predictably got the geeks hugely furious -- and if you scroll down through these old forums you will laugh out loud in recognition of the exact same kind of tap-dance steps that Emerald did in Second Life. Denial, evasion, then seemingly bold and frank admission as if it were normal -- and then incredulity in the open source community and the continued insistence that, well, something that goes in the registry and phones home is adware and spyware.
You know these guys just can't help grabbing the user data every time because that's the business model to sell the ads.
Today, it mainly seems to be used on scam sites as a free download alongside ads purporting to offer streaming sports TV.
SO WAS KAPOR REALLY BEHIND IT?
Kapor didn't have to personally micro-manage or orchestrate or even keep in touch with the anti-SOPA campaign per se beyond an occasional tweet update. He had already founded and funded organizations such as EFF and PCF to do this work enthusiastically and without prompting. Hamlet ne Linden Au tried to get Kapor and Rosedale to make a statement as Second Life founders -- he thought that would give it heft. Fortunately, they had the good sense not to risk offending their content-creating user base (although some of the SLuniverse.com regs were anti-SOPA in keeping with their lefty politics).
Back in February, I argued with Masnick and his fanboyz when they claimed there was "grassroots" campaigning around SOPA. As I put it (under my avatar name, Prokofy):
Of course they're astro-turfs! They are funded by wealthy former software coders and sellers like Mitch Kapor who made their fortunes from proprietary code and then got religion about open source after they could afford to do so. That's all it is. If these organizations and their paid networks didn't exist and normal debates could be held on the merits without the enormously amplified mindshare they have through the laplog tech press, it might be a fair fight. It's not.
yes, it was EFF and its networks, and those are whipsawed by Google. And all roads lead to Joi Ito and Mitch Kapor.
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