Congress is already very close to passing companion bills to censor the internet, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA, H.R. 3261) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA, S. 968). This is in addition to the domain name seizures already underway by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

All of these efforts are terrible ideas. Their supporters don’t understand or care about the internet and are happily willing to break the internet to appease the content industry. It is among the very worst contemporary examples of a government that is of, by, and for special interests, and if it passes, it will be a slap in the face of democracy, free expression, due process, and technological innovation. To top it all? It won’t even do much to stop online infringement.

Fortunately, there may be signs that things are turning our way. I’ll get to that further below.

EFF has a great summary of the several ways SOPA can lead to a site getting shut down. Section 102 deals with foreign sites and is the most all-encompassing, but 103 and 104 are actually easier for rights holders to (mis)use, and they apply to domestic as well as foreign sites, so I’ll start there.

Section 103 allows IP rights holders to go directly to a website’s payment processors and advertisers—and to demand that these third parties cease all business with the website operator. These payment processors and advertisers then have just five days to act. The website operator has the right to file a counter-notice that they are not substantially dedicated to infringement, but (a) they may not get the chance until after the payment processors and advertisers have already cut off payments, and (b) the third parties have no obligation to take the counter-notice as final and re-establish a business relationship.

Section 104 takes this “default=censorship” strategy even further. Everyone in the internet ecosystem—registrars, web hosts, advertisers, financial processors, search engines, etc. etc.—gets near-categorical federal and state immunity for any decision to terminate a business relationship with a site (or even to shutter a site) “in the reasonable belief” that the site is dedicated to infringement. Under Section 103, a rights holder must at least file a claim. Under Section 104, even the intimation that a site is infringing might be enough to get it shut down—and the site would have no legal recourse.

The Administration also gets in on the fun in Section 102, which gives the Attorney General the power to use government-mandated Domain Name System (DNS) filtering to stop Americans from accessing “foreign infringing sites.” A domain name, such as Google.com, is an easy-to-remember way to tell one’s computer to go to a specific numeric address (e.g., 74.125.39.147). It is this number (the IP address) that identifies that site’s server (the computer that hosts the website). Everyone enters the domain name into their browser’s internet address bar, but the numbers would take one to the same site. Click on the numbers above or paste them into your browser to see for yourself.

Under Section 102, if a site were found to be primarily dedicated to infringement, the government could “seize” the site’s domain name. More precisely, the domain name registrar—a company that keeps track of which domain names are attached to which servers—would, if US-based, be compelled to stop sending users to the correct server. All domestic ISPs would also be forbidden to take you to the right server (the number behind the name), and advertisers and banks would be forbidden from doing business with these companies.

If the government found a foreign site to be infringing under these bills, the government would try to make it disappear for US audiences.

If this bill becomes law, we will see the shuttering and/or financial starvation of thousands of websites—which are, of course, a form of speech and/or press. They would be silenced and/or starved based on either an affidavit by a rights holder, a mere suspicion by a business partner, or (at best!) a one-sided court hearing with a low burden of proof. Little wonder then that legal scholars from (my friend and) rising star Marvin Amorri to the legendary constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe (pdf) have concluded that the bills are unconstitutional threats to the First Amendment.

By now it should be clear that, if passed into law, SOPA or PIPA would have devastating consequences for innocent actors who are mistakenly identified. The web seizures undertaken by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), beginning in 2010, illustrate this peril all too well. Several websites have been taken down for posting media files that were authorized and even actively shared by the copyright holders or their representatives. Others have apparently been seized merely for linking to allegedly infringing content.

One in particular, DaJaz1.com, has become the cause célèbre of the anti-domain-seizures movement. It was one of a cluster of hip hop websites seized last year. Major voices from Vibe to Kanye to P. Diddy were actively promoting the sites, hardly a sign that they are dedicated to copyright infringement.

Last week, the feds finally gave up on DaJaz1. TechDirt (which has nearly gone all-SOPA, all-the-time) had the headline:

Feds Falsely Censor Popular Blog For Over A Year, Deny All Due Process, Hide All Details…

Their opening clarifies exactly how unconstitutional this is:

Imagine if the US government, with no notice or warning, raided a small but popular magazine’s offices over a Thanksgiving weekend, seized the company’s printing presses, and told the world that the magazine was a criminal enterprise with a giant banner on their building. Then imagine that it never arrested anyone, never let a trial happen, and filed everything about the case under seal, not even letting the magazine’s lawyers talk to the judge presiding over the case. And it continued to deny any due process at all for over a year, before finally just handing everything back to the magazine and pretending nothing happened. I expect most people would be outraged. I expect that nearly all of you would say that’s a classic case of prior restraint, a massive First Amendment violation, and exactly the kind of thing that does not, or should not, happen in the United States.

They go on to detail how DaJaz1’s owners were stonewalled, blockaded, and never allowed their day in court by the feds—for over a year—while the feds managed to arrange a court process during which all court proceedings (including several granting extensions that DaJaz1’s owners should have been able to contest) were secret and all the filings were sealed and not open to the site owners.

Once the details of the accusations came out, it turned out that the allegedly infringing songs were given directly to the blog by copyright holders’ agents in the hopes of promoting the music. The RIAA was the source of the original complaint, and one of the songs in question was not even released by an RIAA label.

Another operation using similar methods but for a different goal—seizing sites with child pornography—mistakenly took down 84,000 sites in one shot, resulting in each of those thousands of sites being down for 3 days. Even worse, each domain was redirected to an ICE notice that the website had been seized for trafficking in child pornography. Nearly all of those sites were not dedicated to child pornography, and to my knowledge, ICE never even apologized to them for the error.

Further, it takes little imagination to picture a devastating chill on legitimate sites that make fair uses of copyrighted content. If I run a news and commentary site, I may be less likely to include portions of copyrighted works, even if such inclusion is very likely fair use and crucially relevant to my discussion of the matters at hand.

In particular, media criticism sites would be in grave peril; how long after the bill’s passage would it be before partisan news outlets started using the new law to silence their critics? How long before FoxNews goes after Media Matters for America? Think that’s far fetched? Witness Righthaven’s efforts to sue bloggers for using even brief quotations. And what was on the list of threats they used to scare people into paying licensing fees? Domain seizure. Among other things, these bills would give a hunting license for those who would like to shutter the sites of upstarts, competitors, and critics.

At least these bills will stop piracy, right? Hardly.

Dedicated infringers will still find infringing sites—especially foreign sites that host infringing files with impunity. Remember, the feds are seizing the site name (e.g., Google.com) but not the number behind it (74.125.39.147). All you need is a small program to tell your computer to go to the right number—and, because the bill will forbid your ISP from getting you there, a proxy server in the middle. The same strategies have already proven successful for dissidents behind government firewalls, who still manage to upload and download forbidden information—despite far more active, on-the-fly, and resource-intensive censorship schemes.

Programmers have already developed tools to work around these restrictions. The law hasn’t even passed yet, and already there is a Firefox plugin that would help users work around SOPA-like restrictions.

You might think that at least payment processors and advertiser networks would be scared off of dealing with these sites. If it were that easy—if we could target the banks and advertisers that support internet scofflaws—then spam and other internet evils would have long since been wiped out.

The internet breeds decentralized innovation, and innovators will spring into action to help users circumvent ISP and search engine filters as well. This software will also be considered grounds for legal action—with the goal being to ban the tools, as the 1998 DMCA bans DRM-hacking devices. That’s worked so poorly that multiple free circumvention tools are available for most major DRM systems. There are so many DVD rippers that LifeHacker has a post comparing rippers to help you choose the best.

As if all of the above failures and offenses were not enough, these bills would harm our economy and reduce our competitiveness in the internet age. If SOPA were law when YouTube was getting started, the site probably would have been shuttered. The next YouTube will be much less likely to be born in the US if it can be kicked out of the legitimate portion of the web before it has really grown up. The EFF warns that sites like Etsy, Flickr, and Vimeo would be in danger.

Internet innovation is one of the few bright spots in the economy, and major internet firms have warned that this will increase the cost of regulatory compliance and decrease our competitiveness. Venture capitalists have also warned that SOPA would substantially decrease their willingness to invest in US technology start-ups. Union Square Ventures, just down the street here in NYC, even put this link saying the same thing on their homepage.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has placed a hold on PROTECT-IP, and he has even vowed to filibuster the bill should it come to the Senate floor. Because of this principled opposition and his long record of standing up for internet freedom, I made a donation to Sen. Wyden’s re-election campaign—even though my wife and I are watching every dollar as we save to buy our first home.

So these bills are terrrrrible, but they enjoy a lot of support in the House and Senate—30 cosponsors in the House, and a whopping 40 in the Senate. This post is derived from an email I sent to my Senators and Representative, and all three wrote back with disappointing notes to the effect of, “Yeah, but we gotta stop internet infringement.” Surely this is unrelated to the content industries having spent far, far more money on lobbying and campaign donations than their opponents on this issue.

Which brings us back to democracy.

In response to these bills, we have seen the swelling of a major internet movement—nearly the groundswell we saw around network neutrality in 2006. Opponents created a campaign declaring November 16—the day of a hearing in the House that was heavily stacked in favor of SOPA—as “American Censorship Day,” a campaign that went viral in a major way. Over 6,000 sites including Wikipedia, Creative Commons, Mozilla (including the default start page in Firefox), Reddit, TechDirt, and BoingBoing, directed traffic to a single action site, AmericanCensorship.org. At the time, the site said that it had generated over 1,000,000 emails and four calls per second to Congress. To date, AmericanCensorship.org has earned over 650,000 Facebook likes and 63,000 tweets.

This is democracy in action. After all, most people don’t support draconian copyright enforcement, and a solid majority of people oppose government attempts to block access to infringing materials. (40% support, 56% oppose; this skews to 33% for, 64% against when framed as censorship.)

If Wyden’s hold and the opposition can stop this fast-moving train(wreck), then perhaps democratic values and majority opinion can actually shape the future of the internet. Just maybe, a public outcry can stop a terrible idea backed by special interests.

If not, we may be in big trouble—and not just because the internet will be broken.

I’ve written about these Google-Group listservs* before, particularly surrounding the 2010 JournoList/Weigelgate controversy.  These e-mail lists make up a hidden network architecture for the progressive netroots.  There are (probably) thousands of them.  They can be set up (and taken down) within minutes, and Google’s architecture makes them technically impossible to taxonomize.  They’re useful for promoting discussion and debate amongst clusters of networked individuals — people who work on the same thing or have similar interests, but aren’t working for the same organization or based in the same location.  Think of them as watering hole conversations, but digital and more diffuse.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with network backchannels.  They’re a useful and utterly sensible tool.  But one of the interesting things in the JournoList controversy was that conservative activists elevated them to full-fledged Boogeyman status.  The claim was repeatedly asserted that (1) this was proof of a “liberal media conspiracy” and (2) that no such lists exist on the Right.

I took on the first assertion in a paper for the 2010 APSA Annual Meeting, “Beyond Citizen Journalism: Weigelgate, Journolist, and America’s Shifting Media Ecology.”  It’s a silly and outlandlish argument (it persists on Tucker Carlson’s site, the Daily Caller.  That says more about Carlson than it does about the assertion, though).

The second assertion always struck me as unlikely.  ”Really, there are no conservative Google-Groups?”  Why the hell wouldn’t there be?  They’re easy-to-create, pretty useful, and occasionally fun, after all.  But since they’re technically impossible to find (you don’t know about them unless they’re “leaked” or you’re invited to join), it wasn’t an assertion I could directly disprove through research.

Well, here’s the proof.  The Freedom Community is a network backchannel.  Apparently its a pretty secretive one (not surprising, given how conservative activists demonized Journolist).  That’s their choice, and I’ll go on record saying that its unlikely its being used for any genuine conspiracies.  But anyone keeping score ought to take note: the Right uses these same Network Backchannels.  They just stay quieter about them.

*Interesting lesson from my copy-editor: Google-Groups apparently aren’t listservs.  In fact, listservs aren’t listservs.  LISTSERV is a registered trademark, and has been since 1986.  I’m baffled by this little factoid.  It’s on a level with “Happy Birthday” being litigiously copyright-protected.

This one was remarkable for its sponsors: it was cohosted by CNN and the Tea Party.  Audience questions came from “real tea party activists.”  These, unsurprisingly, were not particularly tough questions.  One, from a clean-cut young man (caucasian, as if you has to wonder), asked “of every dollar I earn, what percentage do you think I should keep?”  Yeah, that’s a real hardball for a slate of candidates who leave Rick Santorum as the moderate in the room!

What are we to make of this partnership?  David Weigel has a nice piece up at Slate, discussing internal tensions between movement activists and the Tea Party Express consultants.  It sounds like being a “meta-brand” has its downsides, at least if you want your movement to do more than provide cover for an existing segment of the party leadership.  Jay Rosen was critical of the whole affair (via Twitter), suggesting that it was a bid by CNN to show how “balanced” they could be.

I actually don’t think it’s that big of a deal, and I don’t think it’s about “balance” on CNN’s part either.

I think CNN’s Tea Party partnership is a Will.I.Am holographic interview.

CNN likes to claim the center among the 24-hour news networks.  Fox has the right, MSNBC has the left (but only kinda), so CNN has the center.  ”The most trusted name in news.”  Rosen is right that this is what they like to tell themselves.

But the thing is, if you view their actions, they aren’t driven by a Quest for the Center.  They’re driven by a Quest for Relevance.  iReporters.  Text-message voting on what their top story should be.  Gigantic touchscreen maps and too-sophisticated data visualizations.   CNN embraces anything that seems novel and special in the hopes that it will drive ratings, catch on, and maybe become the next big thing.  CNN is the network of Shiny Objects.

The #CNNTeaParty debate was a gimmick, little more.  Put it in the same category as the 2008 CNN YouTube Debate.  It isn’t a sign of some major transformation of news or politics.  It isn’t even a sign that CNN is desperately trying to hold the middle of the political spectrum.  CNN is more like the middle child, jumping up and down while screaming “look at meeeeeeeee!”  We have to occasionally look, in case the kid is doing something dangerous.  But what those actions aren’t motivated by is an attempt to appear reasonable.  They’re motivated by a quest for attention.

The sad thing is that CNN used to be one hell of a news organization.  Now it’s an attention-starved eight-year-old, perpetually acting out.  In the process, they’ve puffed up the Tea Party brand a bit more, and further emphasized the disjuncture between Tea-Party-as-Movement and Tea-Party-as-Meme.  But it’ll be replaced by some other shiny object soon enough, I’m sure.  CNN isn’t fighting for the center, they’re fighting for relevance.

I agree that she’s a serious candidate, and that we’ll likely be hearing about her for a long time.  I even grant that there’s a chance that the Republican base, unforgiving of Romney’s past centrism, will nominate her.  And I completely agree with Kos that, if nominated, she would virtually assure a 1964-style romp for President Obama.

But underlying the current wave of attention is a conversation over whether or not we are “underestimating” Bachmann.  Fallows points out that “she is an absolute genius at the established political technique of ‘giving the answer you want to give, no matter what the question was,” for instance.  There were several articles a week or two ago that similarly credited her with great political savvy, suggesting that it would be a mistake to equate her with Sarah Palin.

There I have to disagree.  Bachmann certainly knows how to stay on message, but beyond that her political skillset is severely limited.  I think the smart money is on Romney clinching the nomination, albeit after a scary and bruising primary season.

Bachmann rose onto the national landscape during a calamitous Chris Matthews interview in October, 2008.  I studied that incident in detail in my article, “Macaca Moments Reconsidered: Electoral Panopticon or Netroots Mobilization.”  The sound byte from that exchange will be forever memorialized on YouTube.  Here’s the text:

“What I would say is that the news media should do a penetrating expose and take a look. I wish they would. I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America or Anti-America? I think the American people would love to see an expose like that.”

The Netroots seized on this neo-McCarthyite comment and raised $810,000 for her Congressional opponent, Elwyn Tinklenberg, in the space of two days.  Tinklenberg had raised barely a million in the previous year.  Bachmann won, but it was real close.  Since then, she’s converted that increased notoriety into a leadership role in the Republican party network, hitching her star to the Tea Party movement.

Here’s the thing: Bachmann was staying on message when she committed that major gaffe as well.  The interview with Chris Matthews is over 7 minutes long.  If you watch the whole thing, what becomes clear is that Bachmann wasn’t trying to call for a return to McCarthyite witch hunts.  She was trying to stay on message: focusing media attention on Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, and questioning the trustworthiness of Barack Obama.  Through a 7-minute tough interview, Matthews grilled her on what “anti-American” meant, and asked whether other Senators were also anti-American.  She tried to pivot back to a frame of “the media should look at all that.”  And the pivot didn’t work so well.

Now, Kos might be right that none of this matters in the 2012 Republican Primary.  All interviews may be reserved for Fox News and Pajamas Media bloggers.  The Tea Party movement may ignore every shortcoming, blame every gaffe on liberal media bias.

But I still doubt it.

Bachmann struck me in 2008/09 as a politician who loved the media spotlight, but wasn’t very good at handling it.  Staying on message is lesson one in media relations.  But she has shown no capacity for learning lessons 2, 3, 4, or 5.  She often sounds wooden.  She makes basic mistakes like looking into the wrong camera.  She buys into blatantly false internet rumors.  Nothing she has done since then would lead me to alter this impression.  Message discipline simply isn’t enough.  Anyone can learn that skill.

That’s going to be an issue when the primaries get tough.  Even if the Republican primary electorate doesn’t focus on electability, she’s going to face some tough Bill O’Reilly questions at some point, or stare down the barrel of some brutal attack ads from TPaw, Romney, or Herman Cain.  Her negatives within the party will skyrocket after she makes a major misstep.  Tea Party faithful might stick with her, but some will be tempted by Cain or Santorum or Ron Paul.

A lot of smart people in the progressive blogosphere are saying “don’t underestimate Bachmann’s political savvy” right now.  My response would be “don’t overestimate it either.”

I’m cautiously optimistic about Rebuild The Dream, for three reasons: the stakes, the players, and Van himself.  For it to be successful, however, they’re going to have to overcome one traditional dilemma which I’ll call “the college progressive alliance problem.”

—

At one point or another, every student activist has been invited to join a “progressive alliance.”  College campuses are full of activist groups, all of which have overlapping values and none of which have enough members.  This naturally gives rise to the suggestion that “we should all work together!”  A meeting is called, group leaders show up, enthusiastic conversations about power-building and support happen, and everyone genuinely agrees that they’re going to work together more.  Depending on the decade, a listserv or website might be established.  Somebody offers to publish a calendar of events.

Depending on the quality of the organizers, this alliance lasts anywhere from one to six months before the inevitable happens.  People get busy.  Competing challenges and priorities set in.  Each group leader has to prune some worthwhile ideas from their to-do list.  The progressive alliance simply isn’t urgent enough, or immediately salient enough, to make the cut.  Note that these alliances rarely fall to infighting between competing groups.  There isn’t much infighting, because the alliance doesn’t make resource allocation decisions.  It’s just there to be supportive.  But that lightweight support is also what makes it so easy to discard.

Back in my Sierra Student Coalition days, I took part in a half-dozen of these alliances before realizing that they were all plagued by the same systematic problem.  At that point, I started focusing more resolutely on campaigns.  Campaigns are designed to “challenge the balance of power, give people a sense of their own power, and make real, concrete improvements in people’s lives” (According to the Midwest Academy and Saul Alinsky.  And they’re dead-on about this one).  They are comprised of tough, grueling, meaningful work.  And they require constant attention — they’re the item that stays on your to-do list, even as you start cutting out items like “homework,” “friends,” and “sleep.”

—

Rebuild The Dream is not a campaign (nor should it be).  It’s also not a coalition.  Van calls it a “meta-brand.”  It’s one part social movement, two parts meme, and one part enabling technology. But what will that mean in practice?  How, when organizations get busy, will it avoid the College Progressive Alliance Problem?

For starters, they have three things working in their favor.

1. The Stakes.  Rebuild The Dream is forming in response to an ongoing assault on the middle and working class.  Authors like Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have effectively outlined just how serious the stakes are.  Between Citizens United, “the other 98%” campaign, the Ryan budget plan/assault on social security, and the Wisconsin labor fight, there is a lot more interest among progressives in uniting under a single banner than would usually be the case.  I’m primarily an environmentalist, but I’d be happy to work on tax reform these days, because the system is so profoundly broken and that breakage so clearly affects the issues I care about.  In that sense, I’d say that the time is ripe for something like this.  Timing isn’t everything in politics, but it sure does help.

2. The Team.  Natalie, Billy, and Van are held in the highest regard within the broader progressive movement.  These are savvy, veteran organizers.  From top to bottom, the other staff that they’ve recruited are solid players, with experience in the netroots and experience in older, legacy organizations.

The list of organizations that have agreed to put muscle behind this project is also pretty damn impressive.  SEIU and AFL-CIO, Change.org and Move, Center for Community Change and Campaign for America’s Future.  Let me say that again: SEIU and AFL-CIO.  Those are two labor giants who don’t always see eye-to-eye.  Having all those groups at the table means that Rebuild The Dream doesn’t need to worry about building its list or creating a drumbeat among the activist base.  They’re already provided.

3. Van.  This is the x-factor.  Most people know Van Jones as “that guy who Glen Beck got booted from the White House because of a truther petition.”  Long before he joined the White House as Green Jobs Czar, Van Jones was being hailed as a singular voice among environmentalists and labor activists.  He has a once-in-a-generation oratorical gift.  Frankly, without Van Jones, I would dismiss this meta-brand without a second thought.  But so many progressive activists have been deeply and personally inspired by the man (myself among them), that it deserves a much longer look.

Those are the reasons why it might work.  Now here’s my $.02 on how it needs to work.

First, to avoid the college progressive alliance problem, Rebuild the Dream has to give people regular, meaningful activities to engage in.  The infrastructure is there already, so Natalie and company should focus on highlighting shared activities that all of the supporter base can engage in.  They’re off to a good start, with a July 5th event and an October conference.  I’d suggest having one nationwide, distributed activity per month.  This can be activism or service-oriented, reflective practice or mobilization.  But it has to be regular.  Otherwise Rebuild The Dream becomes “that great speech that Van gave that one time.”  And this movement needs to be something more.

These events should mostly be proactive, rather than reactive.  The Netroots are optimally built for reactive politics (I call this “headline chasing” in my book).  The day-to-day work of fighting the Ryan plan, pursuing the Wisconsin recalls, and battling the next crazy idea that our opponents roll out should be left to the existing organizations.  Don’t try to play in that sandbox, that isn’t the movement’s niche.  Instead, focus on proactive — building the vision, demonstrating its mass appeal, creating a shared narrative of what the American Dream means to populist progressives.

Second, put Van out there as much as possible.  There is no such thing as “overexposure” where he’s concerned.  He is your greatest asset, use him accordingly.  I mention this because Van has tried to make clear that “this is not about one charismatic individual.  It’s about all of us.”  …Well, yes and no.  He has to say that, and I know he believes it to be true.  But strategically, it kind of is about a charismatic individual.  Van Jones has a gift like no other for giving voice to deeply held progressive patriotism.  If Rebuild The Dream is going to overcome the college progressive alliance problem, it will be in no small part because of that gift.

Here’s hoping it succeeds.  God knows we need something like this, now more than ever.

I’ve also been tracking an equivalent conservative group, Liberty.com, since its inception.  That group is essentially a stand-in for Eric Odom’s e-mail list — when he migrated to the Patriot Action Network, Liberty.com did so as well (to be clear, I’m not suggesting that’s a bad thing.  It seems like a reasonable application of the “post-bureaucratic” trends that Bruce Bimber has been forecasting for years…).  One major difference immediately jumped out at me: the left uses e-mail to mobilize.  The right uses e-mail to persuade.  As an example, take a look at three e-mails I received today:

The first e-mail comes from “Jim Dean, Democracy for America,” and is titled “Scott Walker vs Planned Parenthood.”

“This is it, folks. DFA’s campaign to recall six anti-union, anti-middle class Wisconsin Republican Senators is almost ready to go and it’s the biggest campaign we’ve ever run.

We’re going to be on the air with new hard-hitting television, radio and web ads against these six Republicans for their votes to destroy unions and middle-class families.

(…)

Please contribute $10 now to fuel our biggest campaign ever and fight back in the war on working families.”

There’s more text to the e-mail, of course, but those short segments give you the feel for it.  This is about Wisconsin, they’ve got a commercial on the air, and they want supporters to help fund it.  The link goes to an ActBlue fundraising page, through which they’ve raised over $100,000 already for their Wisconsin campaign.

The second e-mail comes from the “Stephanie Taylor, BoldProgressives.org” and is titled “Dave, Meet Eric.”

“David,

“The last thing we need to send to Washington is a Democrat who is a kinder, gentler version of the Republicans.”

New Mexico state senator Eric Griego said these words when announcing his candidacy for Congress.

And today, Eric Griego is the first House challenger of 2012 that we’re officially endorsing!

Click here to see Eric Greigo’s announcement — and chip in $3 to his campaign before the closely-watched June 30 fundraising deadline.”

Again, there’s more text to the e-mail, and that text includes an explanation of why Greigo is a Bold Progressive, and several reasons why it’s particularly important for supporters to donate to him now.

The third e-mail comes from “Eric Odom” and is titled “Obama Weak, but Could Still Win.”

Friends,

During the past few weeks I’ve gotten a lot of email with lines such as “we’ve got him on the ropes and he’s going down,” and “He’s toast, he can never win now,” in reference to Obama’s chances in 2012. While I agree he is at his weakest point right now, I in no way believe he’s going to be easy to beat. In fact I still think he holds the upper hand.

This week’s report provides a quick glance at Obama’s current standing, his weakness and his strengths going into 2012. Please read the full report and leave comments!”

Odom’s e-mail includes a few links to other articles on the web, but there’s no more text in the message.

…

Notice the difference?  DFA and the PCCC are using e-mail to persuade and then mobilize action.  Odom is using e-mail to offer his perspective on the days events, and then drive readership to his blog.

This is a remarkably consistent trend.  I’ve catalogued over 100 e-mails from Liberty.com.  That includes less than 5 e-petitions or calls-to-action.  It includes about 20 fundraising requests, but almost all of those are concentrated around the Nevada Senate election last fall, when Odom and company were raising money to run issue advertisements.  Since the end of election season, Liberty.com has pretty much solely been an information dissemination list.

Now, it’s possible that this is just a sample skew.  Sketching the ecology of the rightwing advocacy system is a tough gig, they don’t leave the same digital traces that progressive groups do.  But it’s also very similar to what Jessica Baldwin-Phillipi has been finding in her comparative analysis of rightwing and leftwing microsites: the left uses microsites to drive action, the right uses microsites for persuasion (Jesse is great, by the way.  She should blog more, and you should read her stuff).

What we’re seeing here is a dramatic partisan split in technology usage.  Everybody is accessing the same internet, but they are using it to very different ends.  What makes this particularly interesting is that we’re talking about e-mail – the granddaddy of online communications tools.  If there’s any single online medium where one would expect all actors to converge towards the same “best practices,” it would be e-mail.  That simply hasn’t happened.

I’m not going to argue that one use of e-mail is inherently better than the other.  Rather, I’d say there are two take-home points: (1) e-mail is maleable communications medium, which gets used for a variety of ends. (2) “best practices” among advocacy groups will very depending on the political network and organizing opportunities that the groups are built around.

This isn’t some quote taken out of context. He says it during this NY Times interview, a follow-up interview at a time when he knows he’s facing a lot of public scrutiny.

Despite not yet having tenure–and prompted by a PSC-CUNY call to action–I decided not to sit idly by but rather to voice my horror in an email to the Chancellor and all twelve Trustees. Here is what I said:

Dear Trustee Schmidt and Chancellor Goldstein:

You are undoubtedly getting dozens or hundreds of form emails. Instead of simply signing that pre-written text demanding a full apology and the granting of Mr. Kushner’s honorary degree (with which I firmly agree), I am taking the time to write a specific message.

Mr. Weisenfeld’s attack on Mr. Kushner was bad enough, but his follow-up answers to a New York Times interview illustrate a profound bigotry that cannot be tolerated from one of the public faces of CUNY. The article is available here.

Here is the relevant excerpt from the article:

‘But Mr. Wiesenfeld interrupted and said the question was offensive because “the comparison sets up a moral equivalence.”

Equivalence between what and what? “Between the Palestinians and Israelis,” he said. “People who worship death for their children are not human.”

Did he mean the Palestinians were not human? “They have developed a culture which is unprecedented in human history,” he said.’

I am ashamed to work for a university whose trustee thinks it appropriate to describe Palestinians as “not human.”
Former Mayer Ed Koch is right: Not only should Kushner get his degree, but Mr. Weisenfeld should also lose his position as Trustee.

I hope other faculty and other New Yorkers will join me.

Social media has played an augmenting role in these protests.  There’s the pizza orders, which are pretty cool.  There’s the twitter- and blog-based information diffusion.  There are the solidarity events planned around the country, occurring throughout the past week and also this Saturday.  There’s the $300,000 raised by DailyKos, DFA and PCCC to support the “Wisonsin 14.” And of course there are the “mundane mobilization tools” used to coordinate events themselves.  But in general, whereas the focus on social media in the Arab protests has been so intense as to border on self-parody, no one has really spent much time talking about the internet’s role in this saga.  Nor should they.  The story here is pretty simple.  Walker is trying to destroy the central organizing structure for working class interests.  This isn’t about reduced benefits – the unions have already agreed to cuts – it’s about power, plain and simple.

The new generation of internet-mediated organizations can achieve a lot of things.  They’re optimized for the new media environment, both in terms of organizational overhead, staff structure, membership communications, and rapid tactical repertoire.  But they can’t organize workers in a specific industry or location to increase salary, working conditions, or benefits.  MoveOn isn’t going to sit across from management at the negotiating table.  Your local Meetup group sure doesn’t have that capacity either.  This is the most obvious space where “organizing without organizations” comes up short.  You need to build power if you’re going to confront power.

What’s more, MoveOn, DFA, PCCC, DailyKos, Living Liberally, New Organizing Institute and the rest of the netroots are fully aware of this.  Professional organizers, old-school and new-school, understand that the Wisconsin fight is about power.    Take away the unions, and the super-wealthy will be the only interests in America capable of aggregating massive resources to affect policy change.  It looks an awful lot like a coordinated, multi-year strategy to knock out every significant organization of the left (first ACORN, now Planned Parenthood and the Unions).

I feel the need to point this out because the short-version summary of my research is “the new media environment is transforming the interest group ecology of American politics.  We’re experiencing a ‘generation shift.’”  I want to be absolutely clear about this: what’s happening in Wisconsin isn’t about digital media or about generational displacement in the advocacy group system.  It is a coordinated Rightwing assault on the rights of citizens to organize in the workplace.  Internet-mediated organizations are doing all they can to support the unions in this fight, because they know full well that the unions fill a niche that internet-mediated issue generalists, online communities-of-interest, and neo-federated organizations cannot.  I cannot think of a single serious online organizer who believes otherwise.

“@LisaMcIntire: If I knew what else to do other than following Giffords news and retweeting it, then I would do it.  Just feel helpless.”

This message pretty well sums up my feelings over the past two days.  We’re still learning about the motivations of the shooter, still grappling with the circumstances that led us here, and still praying for the recovery of Representative Giffords and the other injured attendees.  Focusing on anything else hasn’t been easy (I spent this morning working on the intro to chapter 4 of my book.  Kept thinking “okay Dave, why should your audience care about neo-federated organizations.”  In comparison to the magnitude of this tragedy, I draw a blank.).

The last time I can recall being so glued to slow-moving, but “breaking” news was in November 2000. Different circumstances, to be certain, but the commonality was that it was an event in the public sphere that dwarfed all others. The Recount was unfolding at a snail’s pace.  If you were thinking about American politics that month, it simply had to be in reference to the recount.  If you’re thinking about our politics today, the same holds.  Filibuster reform just seems… simple, by comparison.  I must have watched CNN 10 hours a day for 3 weeks straight.  It was unhealthy, and I hated it, but I could think of nothing else to do.  When events of this magnitude occur, we are transformed into a passive audience.  There is nothing we can do but watch and wait, and the national issue feels too monumental to simply detach and walk away.

Moments of crisis like this are, thankfully, few and far between.  I pray that they don’t become more frequent.  The sole point I’d make though, is that I’m glad for social media at times like this.  10 years ago, there was nothing else to do except watch CNN.  The reporting isn’t good.  It CAN’T be good.  It’s the job of those news anchors to repeat what we know so far, over and over, while tracking down an interviewee or two who can provide some sort of perspective.  They’re filling the time while they wait for something to happen.  And you keep sitting there, isolated, watching and waiting.

Twitter doesn’t change that helplessness.  It’s a plain reality – you ARE helpless in the face of such events.  But it gives you something to do.  You’re exposed to the latest news (accurate or not).  You can see other people’s reactions, and notice an apt phrase that captures feelings that you just haven’t quite found the words for.  The retweeting isn’t powerful, but it isn’t pointless either.

I just had a new article come out with Policy & Internet today.  It’s all about e-petitions, the role they play in the tactical repertoire of advocacy groups, and what academics and public intellectuals tend to miss in their criticisms. [/selfpromote]  One of the points I make is that the high-volume, low-quality citizen commentary found in e-petitions  isn’t all that different from the postcards and petitions used in the pre-internet days.  When I worked for the Sierra Student Coalition, we mobilized about 25,000 students to submit “public comments” to the US Forest Service in the first stage of the Clinton Roadless Rule process.  Those public comments were just postcards, signed at tabling events, meetings, or public presentations.  Moving the commenting system online makes them logistically easier, and allows a group to manage the resulting supporter-data more effectively, but besides that its really the same old tactic.

I always feel conflicted when I think about petitions, online or off.  On the one hand, I’d put myself in the same camp as Chris Bowers, Judith Freeman, Adam Green, and Jake Brewer when it comes to e-petitions: they can be used well, but they rarely are.  On the other hand, most of the value I’ve historically seen in petitions comes from the work of collecting them.

My first real organizing effort came in high school, with the Coalition to Save the Belt Woods.  Larry Bohlen, my first mentor, was the leader of that effort.  We were trying to move a bond bill through the MD State Legislature, and the basic tools we were starting out with were handwritten letters and a petition. “Letters are worth a lot more than petition signatures, because they reveal more effort,” he told me.  I focused on the petition anyway.

I used that petition to launch MCSEA (Montgomery County Student Environmental Activists).  First, I talked to my environmental club about the issue, handed out petitions, and asked people to get signatures in classes, lunchrooms, and hallways.  Next, I and a couple friends started “the road show.”  We approached the environmental clubs of 5 other schools, set up times to go talk about the issue, and handed out petitions.  The petition was like swiss army knife for us.  It gave us a clear “Ask” at the end of the environmental club meetings, and (unlike handwritten letters) consisted of those club members taking sustained action over the following weeks.  Most people who agreed to collect petition signatures never brought them back.  But those who did so had demonstrated a level of commitment, and in turn formed the initial MCSEA membership.

All-in-all, we gathered 1,000 petition signatures from 6 high schools in under a month.  And that led to a next step: delivery.  We made 42 photocopies of those petitions (on recycled paper, of course), set up meetings with our state legislators in Annapolis, and walked into those meetings with individual piles of petitions large enough to make a satisfying “THUD” on a desk.  A couple dozen of us made that trip, and a few of us also testified at the committee hearings about the bond bill, discussing why high school students felt so strongly about protecting our last remaining wild forests in the state.  Over the next month, we planned rallies and media events, lobbied legislators, and generally augmented the various tactics Larry was rolling out.  The bill sailed through the legislature and, within months, MCSEA had its first win.

In the following year, I’d use petitions in a similar manner two more times.  A petition would serve as the opening salvo in our student organizing in the anti-InterCounty Connector (ICC… a highway) campaign.  That road show increased MCSEA’s reach to over a dozen schools, and was the first in a very, very long campaign effort that left me with more gray hairs at 18 than I have at 32.  And in the final week of my high school career, Larry Bohlen would memorably call me late on a Monday night and ask if I could organize a petition drive to convince the Governor to veto an anti-clean air bill.  A test of just how big MCSEA had gotten, we managed to generate over 2,500 signatures in under 48 hours, and, stationing a few graduating seniors by their parents’ fax machines, managed to shut down the Governors faxes for 2 days straight while sending them to him, one sheet at a time.  (Yeah. The Governor vetoed the bill. Like I said, the good ol’ days…)

E-petitions are a minor example of the loss of beneficial inefficiencies, which is an overarching theme in the internet’s impact on social systems.  Moving our petitions online makes them more efficient, and let’s you do somewhat-useful things with the data.  But, at least in my experience, the real value of a petition drive was derived directly from those inefficiencies.  ”Forward to a friend” requires less effort and commitment than”get 50 classmates to sign this.”  And it’s the effort and commitment that provides a bedrock for the cool things we would later DO with those petitions.

Does that mean groups should avoid e-petitions?  Well, no.  And I’ll note that Larry’s suggestion of focusing on handwritten letters (because they demonstrate greater interest) was well-ignored.  We demonstrated more interest/commitment with a petition drive than with a smaller set of handwritten letters.  The same is doubtless true of e-petititons.  Some high school student somewhere is going to come up with a great, creative use of them, one that I can’t quite envision.  But it does mean that useful high-volume tactics like petitions (online or off) have layers to them, and those layers are easy to overlook unless you’re in the midst of it all.

You can consider this a lengthy footnote to the new article, I suppose.  I draw upon some of my old organizing experience a bit in the article, but as a piece of social science, it’s mostly based on evidence that others can verify through independent observation.  In writing it, I could only dip my toes into the subject of “what makes an effective tactic.”  These experiences constitute the path that drove me to that perspective.