Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by and David Moon Patrick Ruffini David Segal Page A
Tags: Bisac Code 1: POL035000
Ads: Link
Initiative. I turned to every startup founder in the room in turn and said “What are you going to do?”—and they all wanted to one-up each other.
David Segal
Brad leaned on his portfolio companies to participate, and with that came a scatter shot of some of the moment’s most influential social media start-ups, and a home base for the meeting: Tumblr’s hipster-chic offices in lower Manhattan. I leaned on Zoe Lofgren’s office to have the Congresswoman open the call, and she quickly accepted: her gravitas would help draw people in, and she would be able to walk us through the nuts-and-bolts of the markup process. And the techies whom we were hoping would participate would be impressed by her savvy about issues that many of them seemed to assume every last member of Congress was completely ignorant of.
Alex Ohanian
Apparently I was the only one celebrating SantaCon that day. Nonetheless, before celebrating with hordes of my fellow Kringles, I took a seat and we went around the room, volunteering contributions from our websites that might help spread the word about SOPA and PIPA. Today, reddit is one of the one hundred most popular sites online, but it’s rare in that the platform is rather open—much like the Internet itself. My offering was simple: we’d present the threat to the reddit community and give them our rationale behind the opposition. I didn’t know how our millions of users would react to the imminent threat, but I knew the best ideas for action wouldn’t come from me or even this room of “experts.”
Elizabeth Stark
We decided on a strategy. On November 16, sites such as Mozilla, Tumblr, reddit, and even 4chan would blackout their logos in protest of SOPA. Fight for the Future set up a central site called American Censorship Day, where all the sites involved were listed. And there was a call for the Internet community to get involved. This was a watershed moment in the politics of the Internet: sites like Mozilla and Tumblr took a public stance for the first time ever on a political issue.
6. The Markup
Patrick Ruffini
Our path to victory was dangerously narrow. As best, I could predict, it would play out as follows: Lamar Smith would succeed in ramming the bill through markup on the Judiciary Committee, and at that point, we would need to rely on Tea Party pressure to save us at the eleventh hour by persuading House majority leader Eric Cantor not to schedule SOPA for the floor. It seemed more plausible than any other SOPA death scenario, especially as the Senate seemed far more likely to pass its own tamer version of the bill. Nonetheless, given the deferencenormally given powerful committee chairs like Smith, it was a perilous path forward for the opposition.
Zoe Lofgren
A “markup” of a bill is a time when the committee of jurisdiction meets to go through the bill, line by line, with Members of the Committee offering amendments. It is a formal proceeding, televised and now webcast. December 15, 2011 was the beginning of the Judiciary Committee “markup” of SOPA. Showtime.
Patrick Ruffini
On the night of the 14th, I received a frenzied call from a tech industry lobbyist. Smith had been twisting arms, we didn’t know who was on our side anymore, and we were down to as few as half a dozen votes on the committee. The Internet needed to light up the phones. At the suggestion of a Capitol Hill veteran in my office, I would tweet out the direct line to the Judiciary committee staff room. It was reasoned that members would be taking meetings there in between votes. We brainstormed creative ways for members to experience the crescendo of outrage firsthand.
Aaron Swartz
Big stories like this are just more interesting at human scale. The director J. D. Walsh said good stories should be like the poster for Transformers . There’s a huge robot on the left side of the poster and a huge army on the right, but in the middle, at the bottom, there’s just a small family, trapped in between. Big
David Segal
Brad leaned on his portfolio companies to participate, and with that came a scatter shot of some of the moment’s most influential social media start-ups, and a home base for the meeting: Tumblr’s hipster-chic offices in lower Manhattan. I leaned on Zoe Lofgren’s office to have the Congresswoman open the call, and she quickly accepted: her gravitas would help draw people in, and she would be able to walk us through the nuts-and-bolts of the markup process. And the techies whom we were hoping would participate would be impressed by her savvy about issues that many of them seemed to assume every last member of Congress was completely ignorant of.
Alex Ohanian
Apparently I was the only one celebrating SantaCon that day. Nonetheless, before celebrating with hordes of my fellow Kringles, I took a seat and we went around the room, volunteering contributions from our websites that might help spread the word about SOPA and PIPA. Today, reddit is one of the one hundred most popular sites online, but it’s rare in that the platform is rather open—much like the Internet itself. My offering was simple: we’d present the threat to the reddit community and give them our rationale behind the opposition. I didn’t know how our millions of users would react to the imminent threat, but I knew the best ideas for action wouldn’t come from me or even this room of “experts.”
Elizabeth Stark
We decided on a strategy. On November 16, sites such as Mozilla, Tumblr, reddit, and even 4chan would blackout their logos in protest of SOPA. Fight for the Future set up a central site called American Censorship Day, where all the sites involved were listed. And there was a call for the Internet community to get involved. This was a watershed moment in the politics of the Internet: sites like Mozilla and Tumblr took a public stance for the first time ever on a political issue.
6. The Markup
Patrick Ruffini
Our path to victory was dangerously narrow. As best, I could predict, it would play out as follows: Lamar Smith would succeed in ramming the bill through markup on the Judiciary Committee, and at that point, we would need to rely on Tea Party pressure to save us at the eleventh hour by persuading House majority leader Eric Cantor not to schedule SOPA for the floor. It seemed more plausible than any other SOPA death scenario, especially as the Senate seemed far more likely to pass its own tamer version of the bill. Nonetheless, given the deferencenormally given powerful committee chairs like Smith, it was a perilous path forward for the opposition.
Zoe Lofgren
A “markup” of a bill is a time when the committee of jurisdiction meets to go through the bill, line by line, with Members of the Committee offering amendments. It is a formal proceeding, televised and now webcast. December 15, 2011 was the beginning of the Judiciary Committee “markup” of SOPA. Showtime.
Patrick Ruffini
On the night of the 14th, I received a frenzied call from a tech industry lobbyist. Smith had been twisting arms, we didn’t know who was on our side anymore, and we were down to as few as half a dozen votes on the committee. The Internet needed to light up the phones. At the suggestion of a Capitol Hill veteran in my office, I would tweet out the direct line to the Judiciary committee staff room. It was reasoned that members would be taking meetings there in between votes. We brainstormed creative ways for members to experience the crescendo of outrage firsthand.
Aaron Swartz
Big stories like this are just more interesting at human scale. The director J. D. Walsh said good stories should be like the poster for Transformers . There’s a huge robot on the left side of the poster and a huge army on the right, but in the middle, at the bottom, there’s just a small family, trapped in between. Big
Similar Books
