Something amazing just happened
Members of Congress have traditionally been so insulated from the populaces they purportedly represent that they require experts with colorful charts and graphs to explain to them that people are unhappy about not having jobs. Yet with shocking suddeness, a bill that was set to sail through congress, that had the full blessings of both sides of the aisle, one of the few bills to actually make it through this fiercely divided legislative branch, a bill purportedly designed to protect intellectual property from piracy, was shut down by a unified protest accross the internet.
I think I'm wondering what the rest of America is wondering. Where the hell were you guys when they pushed the Patriot act through? Oh, thats right... you protested it loudly and proudly! You fought it in every way that you could. Yet what did not work then, somehow worked now.
Now we could attribute this disparity to the fact that the nation was in the grip of mass hysteria then, whereas we're just slightly alarmed and rather depressed now. Fear leads to rash decisions, and the damn thing was called the Patriot act. Yet we have just as much to be distracted by now as then; the antics of the republican primaries, a cruise ship disaster. And if you're looking for somethin to press that old panic button, we've even got another (conveniently oil rich) country thats just begging to be invaded (this one might actually HAVE nuclear weapons), not to mention a couple of wars still brewing (though we subcontracted out one of them to mercenaries). And let us not forget the macabre spectacle of our imploding economy.
With all of this competing for our attention, the internet, long dismissed as at best a side show, at worst a den of thieves, suddenly grabbed us as a nation and shook us. We got on the phone with our representatives, and, lo and behold, support withdrawn, the bill has been evicerated. 'The system works,' we tell ourselves. We sigh a brief sigh of relief. I would not be surprised if Congress' dismal approval ratings even bumped up a few points.
Let us bask in this moment. We, across our various social networks, just shot down an important piece of legislation that had the hopes and dreams and dollars of Rupert Murdoch and his ilk riding upon it. And we did it all by ourselves.
Major media outlets will cry foul at this. Murdoch already has, blaming the search engines for spreading their corporate agenda. Yet Google, by far the most ubiquitous of the participants, was also the most discreet. Simply censoring their logo seems more a show of solidarity than the explicit attempt at propaganda it's been characterized as. Don't get me wrong, there have been some fierce diatribes online, and some very creative ones, I even made one myself (above).
When we get right down to it, we weren't being told what to think, we were being told what was happening. The former seems to be the raison d'etre of our media. Having recognized this, more and more of those looking for the latter, for actual information on what is going on, find it on the internet. And across that internet for the past 48 hours or so, every one everywhere, our friends on facebook, our dinosaur cartoons, even the great open source library (AKA wikipedia) brought to our attention the potentially dire implications of this legislation. Based on that information, private citizens, of their own volition called their senators, then told their friends to call their senators, suddenly half the senate has changed their minds.
Do you, dear reader, not see how amazing this is? We have just, as a nation, bypassed so many of the impediments that we normally see as existing between us and our politicians. We depend on mass media to tell us what our politicians are up to. Politicians depend on statisticians, pollsters and, of course, lobbyists to tell them what we want. We've just cut out the middle men. We've just proven that it doesn't matter how much free speech a corporate giant donates to a candidate. It does not matter how many lobbyists pushed that bill, and I assure you they were many and well spoken (actors always need work). If we, as a people, call, write and otherwise harass our representatives, they do respond. They have to. They want to get reelected.
We have just witnessed the first stirrings of the Peer to Peer (P2P) revolution in America. We communicated with one another, came to a consensus and informed our politicians what we wanted. They responded, as well they should, this a Democracy after all (at least nominally). For an example of how P2P revolutions go down without democracy, see Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Iran.
In America the P2P revolution has the potential to go quite peacefully. So long as our politicians remain responsive. Our collective voice is a bigger megaphone than any Super PAC can afford. All we need to accomplish our goals is the freedom to communicate with one another and the will to speak out. That is the essence of the P2P revolution.
This is not the power of Google, nor of Wikipedia or of any of the hundreds of sites that participated in the black out. This is OUR power. They were just kind enough to remind us of it.
But before we start resting on our laurels, we must remember that those who profit from the traditional broadcast paradigm, the gatekeepers of mass media, will not relinquish their power without a fight. If our politicians can talk directly to us, why should they have to raise ridiculous sums of money for television ads? And if they don't need all that money for ads, then they don't need millions to campaign for public office. And if they don't need to go begging corporations for campaign donations, well then they wouldn't have to make promises to corporations. In a Peer to Peer society our public servants might actually serve.... the public.
Oh goodness, people, you better work hard to protect your internet. It's the best chance we have as a nation of taking back our government. A lot of very powerful people are not going to like that one bit.
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