Motherbrain: My thoughts on SOPA / PIPA
I am leaving this cut-less because I want it to be visible today.
I will admit flat out that I have not read the bill myself. However, in most cases, that puts me in the same league as those men and women voting on the thing. Not sure if they have broken their streak and read the provisions of the bill themselves on this one, or just made assumptions as usual.
Firstly, those people whose job it is to monitor the internet for trends, pulse and the like pretty much on the whole think it's a stupid idea. I believe there are several assumptions being made that make this a very bad idea.
One assumption is that we people on the internet aren't set enough in our ways that something like SOPA will prevent us from finding ways to do what we do anyway. I'm not touching piracy. I'm talking about talking freely to strangers about subjects we'd never mention to our family. Now, that's not specifically addressed, that I know of, but if the bits and pieces I am hearing are true, it would definitely change the way we could do it. We started the internet culture when we were counting the ones and zeroes as they beeped down the phone line almost slowly enough for us to hear them. We discovered a wider world out there with people with different ideas, different ways of communicating those ideas, and different thresholds of politeness within our greater communities. If I'm hearing and parsing things correctly, our blogs, microblogs and community places could suffer for very little reason at all. If they are torn down, I predict another means would arise pretty quickly.
My first experience with Internet Community was with my friends who ended up calling themselves "Vagrants". We started off on another message board (or at least where I joined them). However, we ran into two problems: moderation of our chosen topics, and bandwidth. We'd 'break the board' on a regular basis. It got to the point that we were chomping at the bit and branching out to other services to get our messages from one point to another. Two of our number took pity on us and decided to make our own space with fewer restrictions and more bandwidth. The Vagrant Cafe was born. It has since closed its doors, but for ten strong years, it was a small community of specific members who developed their own mini-language and culture and means for dealing with life.
The internet is full of ... 'vagrants'. There are many different boards and places where once a person becomes fully acclimated, he or she begins to speak a whole new language. We don't 'make friends' anymore, we 'friend' or 'unfriend', 'follow' or 'unfollow'. Every site develops its own mini-culture. This is inevitable and healthy. However, if many of these sites are forced to alter their means of operation (in very real, very invasive ways), our little mini-cultures either overload or over-mod. In either case, however, our little world goes from near-democracy to tyranny pretty damn fast.
And, yes, 'it's just the internet', but increasingly, people are living here. There is no soil, but with the advent of 'the cloud', there may as well be. It still is -- and I believe always should be -- a wild, untamed place, built and maintained by the dreams of people from varied parts of the world.
There are dark corners. There are places filled with the 'evils of men's hearts'. However, much like prohibition, this move won't clean out those corners at all. In fact, it may well highlight them, making them more interesting, raising the 'coolness' factor. This isn't something we want done to those black corners.
At the risk of sounding too much like my father, "you can't legislate morality." A person's moral code and the code of law they live under are two very separate things. 'One size fits all' isn't going to fit with the internet, because we cover such a disparate gamut of cultures, religions, ideas, worldviews and languages.
In other words, it's not just the execution that's pretty flawed, it's the very idea, at least in its current incarnation.
I will admit flat out that I have not read the bill myself. However, in most cases, that puts me in the same league as those men and women voting on the thing. Not sure if they have broken their streak and read the provisions of the bill themselves on this one, or just made assumptions as usual.
Firstly, those people whose job it is to monitor the internet for trends, pulse and the like pretty much on the whole think it's a stupid idea. I believe there are several assumptions being made that make this a very bad idea.
One assumption is that we people on the internet aren't set enough in our ways that something like SOPA will prevent us from finding ways to do what we do anyway. I'm not touching piracy. I'm talking about talking freely to strangers about subjects we'd never mention to our family. Now, that's not specifically addressed, that I know of, but if the bits and pieces I am hearing are true, it would definitely change the way we could do it. We started the internet culture when we were counting the ones and zeroes as they beeped down the phone line almost slowly enough for us to hear them. We discovered a wider world out there with people with different ideas, different ways of communicating those ideas, and different thresholds of politeness within our greater communities. If I'm hearing and parsing things correctly, our blogs, microblogs and community places could suffer for very little reason at all. If they are torn down, I predict another means would arise pretty quickly.
My first experience with Internet Community was with my friends who ended up calling themselves "Vagrants". We started off on another message board (or at least where I joined them). However, we ran into two problems: moderation of our chosen topics, and bandwidth. We'd 'break the board' on a regular basis. It got to the point that we were chomping at the bit and branching out to other services to get our messages from one point to another. Two of our number took pity on us and decided to make our own space with fewer restrictions and more bandwidth. The Vagrant Cafe was born. It has since closed its doors, but for ten strong years, it was a small community of specific members who developed their own mini-language and culture and means for dealing with life.
The internet is full of ... 'vagrants'. There are many different boards and places where once a person becomes fully acclimated, he or she begins to speak a whole new language. We don't 'make friends' anymore, we 'friend' or 'unfriend', 'follow' or 'unfollow'. Every site develops its own mini-culture. This is inevitable and healthy. However, if many of these sites are forced to alter their means of operation (in very real, very invasive ways), our little mini-cultures either overload or over-mod. In either case, however, our little world goes from near-democracy to tyranny pretty damn fast.
And, yes, 'it's just the internet', but increasingly, people are living here. There is no soil, but with the advent of 'the cloud', there may as well be. It still is -- and I believe always should be -- a wild, untamed place, built and maintained by the dreams of people from varied parts of the world.
There are dark corners. There are places filled with the 'evils of men's hearts'. However, much like prohibition, this move won't clean out those corners at all. In fact, it may well highlight them, making them more interesting, raising the 'coolness' factor. This isn't something we want done to those black corners.
At the risk of sounding too much like my father, "you can't legislate morality." A person's moral code and the code of law they live under are two very separate things. 'One size fits all' isn't going to fit with the internet, because we cover such a disparate gamut of cultures, religions, ideas, worldviews and languages.
In other words, it's not just the execution that's pretty flawed, it's the very idea, at least in its current incarnation.