So, how was your blackout day?

What did you see — or not see — today? How was your Internet different today than all other days?

I missed the heck out of coming to the blog to read comments. But I was delighted to see so many sites either blacked out or joining in spirit (as Google did with the black censorship bar over its famous logo). Wendy McElroy, The Agitator, BoingBoing, Reddit, Backwoods Home, Wired, The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, Rational Review News — all were “dark with SOPA/PIPA protests when I visited them today.

Oddly, Wikipedia, the most widely touted resister and a resistance leader whose ominously shadowed blackout screen showed up in news stories all over the Web, wasn’t blacked out to me. I poked around several times and was able to reach every Wikipedia page I tried. And that was without using any workarounds. All I saw was a line saying the site was blocked in protest. But for me, it wasn’t. Heh. I must have a wizard on my side, eh?

One of the coolest responses was a cartoon printed at Mashable. (Scroll down; but the article above it is good, too.)

There were in-person protests. Like this one in front of the office of Authoritarian-in-chief Charles Schumer.

And the rats in the Senate scurried away from PIPA. The thing lost at least five co-sponsors today. But why were these jackasses supporting the thing in the first place? I mean, didn’t they read it or think about it before they put their names on it?

Oh. Silly me. Of course they didn’t. They just saw that it was on the wishlist of their corporate cronies and that was good enough for them. And of course, if there’s power in it for them and power taken from us, all the better …

Speaking of those cronies … How do you suppose “retired” senator Chris Dodd suddenly became head of the Motion Picture Association of America (the group that actually wrote the bill)? Hm … never noticed him having a long history of making movies, did you? Must be some other factor to consider there …

Yet he calls what we did an “abuse of power.” An abuse of power. From us. Toward him.

I think there’s a word for that. The word is chutzpah. There are other words, of course. But I can’t print them here on a family blog.

Dodd also repeated the same sort of “let them eat cake” canard as that unidentified congressional staffer the other day who couldn’t understand why hacker-protestors didn’t “just hire a lobbyist like everybody else” if they had a gripe against freedom-stealing government. Dodd complained, “Why don’t they [owners of the big blacked-out sites] just come to the table” — and negotiate with the government on the government’s own terms?

Hm. I doubt very much that Dave Duffy, or even Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, for that matter, got an invitation “to the table” or could have as much influence there as the MPAA or RIAA. As to the rest of us ordinary internet users — who are better represented by the productive anarchy of Wikipedia and Reddit than we are by government — we obviously have no place at the table. The power of protest — and of taking away our presence, withdrawing our consent, refusing our sanction, of saying a big eff-u — is all we’ve got.

How hysterical that a man like Dodd, who has lived his life as a corporate pawn and a constitutional abuser, should claim that a Wikipedia blackout (or a BHM or Agitator or Wendy McElroy blackout) makes the rest of us “corporate pawns.” But yes, he really did call us that. Because the centralized Big Money interests want us to see the battle over SOPA/PIPA as being
the poor, stressed-out little movie and music industries vs. the Evil Kingpins of Silicon Valley. (Yeah, as if Jimmy Wales and the gazillion volunteers of Wikipedia are a giant, control-freaking corporation.)

But Art Brodsky of the Huffington Post answers that one in style: The battle isn’t between the corporations of Hollywood and the corporations of Silicon Valley. It’s between Hollywood and America, as millions of us know too well. Since Hollywood has bought and paid for Congress, America is at a distinct disadvantage and will, of course, have to resort to guerrilla tactics.

Still such disingenuous wailing does demonstrate that The Powers That Be are scared. And that’s a good and great thing. Thank you, Wikipedia, Reddit, Wired, Google … thank you all, great and small, for scaring the bejabbers out of our would-be masters today.

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Speaking of the small, Carl-Bear Bussjaeger wrote on his blackout page:

I think it’s worth noting (for the benefit any possible remaining doubters) that I am a writer. My work has been serially, parallelly, and multivariantly pirated to my detriment. AND I OPPOSE SOPA/PIPA because 1) it destroys any last vestige of free speech, 2) doesn’t actually help the actual creators of works subject to piracy, 3) but does guaranteed a revenue stream and control of artistic works for the benefit of corporations rather than artists (Doubt it? Look what big publishing corps are pushing this.)

And speaking of the slightly-less-small, Randall Munroe, creator of the nerd’s favorite webcomic, xkcd, wrote on his blackout page:

I make my living drawing xkcd, which wouldn’t have been possible if people hadn’t been able to freely share my comics with each other all over the internet. As a copyright holder and small-business owner, I oppose SOPA and PIPA.

Yeah, what they said. Anybody who’s been reading me for any time knows I’m very much pro-IP and that I detest people who steal artists’ work. I’m not pro-copyright-business-as-usual, of course. Not pro-MPAA or pro-RIAA. But a dedicated believer of creators’ rights to their own work. Like Carl-Bear I’ve had thieves abuse my work. Like Randall Munroe, I’ve also benefited from having my work spread around.

But in either case, SOPA and PIPA have nothing — zero, zip, nada — to do with protecting creators’ rights. Oh riiiiight, we’re supposed to imagine that the MPAA and RIAA are, at bottom, gentle philanthropic endeavors whose sole mission is to ensure that those who create receive a just reward.

Who would ever have thought that when censorship finally came to this country (and we all knew, didn’t we, that freedom of speech would be the last of the Bill of Rights to go), it would come in the form of a government-corporate partnership (e.g. fascism) and in the name of “protecting rights”?

We scared ’em today. Netizens done good, big and small. I had nothing to do with the decision for this blog to go dark today. But if Dave Duffy had asked me, I’d have resoundingly agreed. I’m really proud that I work for people with enough brass and enough integrity to sacrifice even a day’s worth of much needed income from their website to participate in this act of resistance. But of course this isn’t over and most likely never will be, as Tom Knapp says. (And Jeffrey Tucker says, too.)

The ‘Net will remain free — even if eventually ours becomes the type of freedom enjoyed only by pirates and other Outlaws. But then, we’re used to that, aren’t we?

We must never, ever, ever be reduced to “coming to the government’s table” to conduct civilized discussions — e.g. begging on our knees to our masters — about just how much more of our freedom we’ll permit them to seize. And enough of this BS about the people with the most gold making all the rules.

Today was a small, perhaps ultimately meaningless bit of non-violent guerrilla warfare. It was just theater. Just a demonstration. But then, the Boston Tea Party was that, also.