Black to Grey to Black: Lessons From Two Decades of Online Activism
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00:00
DatenerfassungBaumechanikSelbst organisierendes SystemDigitalsignalSinusfunktionGruppenoperationQuelle <Physik>Stochastische AbhängigkeitFreewareWort <Informatik>Deskriptive StatistikDivisionPunktCASE <Informatik>Leistung <Physik>PackprogrammSpannweite <Stochastik>MereologieKontextbezogenes SystemKopula <Mathematik>DifferenteSchlüsselverwaltungRechenschieberBitMAPMultiplikationsoperatorHill-DifferentialgleichungWeb-SeiteDomain <Netzwerk>DatensatzGüte der AnpassungInternetworkingQuick-SortComputerspielSprachsyntheseMomentenproblemPerspektiveSoftwaretestAntwortfunktionArithmetisches MittelArbeit <Physik>BenutzerbeteiligungForcingRuhmasseSoftwareSchnittmengeVerschiebungsoperatorStrategisches SpielMusterspracheMathematikParallele SchnittstelleDateiformatGesetz <Physik>GrenzschichtablösungWeb SiteHypermediaGrauwertTelekommunikationWeb logZweiEinsHyperbelverfahrenBaumechanikSchwebungComputeranimationVorlesung/Konferenz
09:10
Vorzeichen <Mathematik>CD-IFreewareSprachsyntheseExt-FunktorFormation <Mathematik>Wort <Informatik>GruppenoperationBenutzerbeteiligungSprachsyntheseMereologieMashup <Internet>Web SiteInternetworkingFreewareMultiplikationsoperatorBildgebendes VerfahrenCASE <Informatik>SoftwaretestKugelkappeEreignishorizontTotal <Mathematik>FunktionalDatenflussCodeKategorie <Mathematik>Gesetz <Physik>SoftwareAvatar <Informatik>EntscheidungstheorieSchätzfunktionTelekommunikationZahlenbereichStrategisches SpielSchnittmengeGarbentheorieARM <Computerarchitektur>PunktInhalt <Mathematik>MedianwertQuick-SortKontextbezogenes SystemStandardabweichungValiditätFamilie <Mathematik>Mailing-ListeParallele SchnittstelleHypermediaRechenwerkQuellcodeSystemplattformExogene VariableFramework <Informatik>Physikalisches SystemComputerarchitekturLastComputerunterstützte Übersetzung
17:47
SpezialrechnerVideokonferenzNewton, IsaacEinfügungsdämpfungInternetworkingSoundverarbeitungRuhmasseWeb SiteSoftwareHilfesystemEinsGruppenoperationWhiteboardKategorie <Mathematik>Gesetz <Physik>ServerBenutzerbeteiligungSystemaufrufInternettelefonieSprachsyntheseAvatar <Informatik>SoftwareentwicklerMultiplikationsoperatorRechter WinkelTransaktionAutomatische DifferentiationMusterspracheInformationElektronisches MarketingInverser LimesMailing-ListeMessage-PassingE-MailYouTubeFestplatteSpieltheorieLeistung <Physik>WinkelMAPEntscheidungstheorieRoutingMinkowski-MetrikPunktNichtunterscheidbarkeitNewton, IsaacGoogolWort <Informatik>MathematikFramework <Informatik>HypermediaFokalpunktPerspektiveInformationsverarbeitungSummierbarkeitPhysikalisches SystemResultanteGamecontrollerEnergiedichteDienst <Informatik>RechenwerkRahmenproblemGewicht <Ausgleichsrechnung>SystemzusammenbruchZentralisatorBesprechung/Interview
26:25
Computeranimation
Transkript: Englisch(automatisch erzeugt)
00:17
Hello, let's start with our second session at stage 3.
00:25
And we have here Parker Higgins from San Francisco. And he is one of the, he is an activist and blogger of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And he is here today to present us a session about black to grey to black lessons from
00:47
two decades of online activism and he will tell us a little bit more. And he is asking whether we should have a museum of online activism or not and I am very interested in his answers. Okay, let's start.
01:03
Hi everybody, this is a little strange. I want to thank everybody for coming to see me instead of Bianca Jagger. I'll put one ear off and I'll let you know if she says anything very interesting. So, I thank you for coming, my name is Parker Higgins, I work at the Electronic Frontier
01:20
Foundation. I hope that many of you know my employer, the EFF, but in case you don't, we are a non-profit based in San Francisco that's been working at the intersection of civil liberties and technology for over 20 years. So we've been doing that for a long time.
01:42
And as part of that we've been involved in a lot of activism campaigns. Most recently things like SOPA and ACTA and TPP and we've been working on activism and legislative and really court pushes against NSA spying. So it's a broad range of things and I'm very proud of my employer so I'll keep
02:02
talking about them over and over. But personally I have been a copyright reform activist for long before I started there. And I want to give a little context, I'm going to be talking about, I say two decades, it's actually 18 years of activism history. I'm 26, so the first things I talk about I studied, like I sat down and I researched
02:24
them and then some of the later things I talked about were things that were very formative to me and then the most recent things, things like SOAP are things that I've been honored and privileged to work on myself. So there are three major points that I want to talk about today.
02:44
The first one is history. As I say in the description, we don't keep very good records of the history of online activism. We remember some of it but it starts to fade. I'll be talking about particularly online activism that's about online speech.
03:02
So speech about speech centered on the SOPA blackouts of 2012, Gray Tuesday, which was a 2004 campaign, and the black worldwide web protests against the Communications Decency Act, which took place in 1996. I expect everybody here probably knows a fair bit about the SOPA blackouts,
03:25
but probably fewer people are familiar with Gray Tuesday and even fewer know about the CDA blackouts, and that's fine. I think that's because of the second point, which is context. That we tend to overestimate the lasting place in public consciousness that each
03:41
of the campaigns that we work on or take part in will hold. And then at the same time we underestimate the importance of earlier campaigns. So people who were affected by SOPA or who took part in the act of protests think that that will last a long time. And in a sense it will. I do think that it will have a major impact, but
04:01
I think the details start to fade pretty quickly. And then at the same time, by not looking at earlier campaigns, we tend to focus on the wrong things. So when we talk about what worked with SOPA, when we talk about SOPA activism, we look at the tactics. We say, it was a blackout and it was major companies that took part. And I think that that's a mistake,
04:23
particularly because we should look to patterns for strategy. So we should look to patterns and strategy, not just tactics. The most effective campaigns over the decades, and I'm picking three, but there are many I could pick from, have been the ones that have harnessed essential qualities of the network.
04:42
And those essential qualities shift over time, meaning that the tactics will have to change. But the impulses underlying them remain the same. And I think that we duplicate a lot of labor if we don't learn this. And then as sort of a bonus item, I want to talk about a few sort of evergreen tips and the way that path dependence has affected
05:03
online activism, which I'll unpack later. So starting with the history, I want to just give a shout out real quick. I said earlier that we don't keep very good records of online activism campaign, and I think that's true. But I couldn't even begun to do this research without the Internet Archive
05:21
at archive.org. Things like news articles, campaign pages on domains that didn't get renewed, and even intentional historical revisionism, where someone who's lost from an activism campaign goes back and changes things. That all gets captured by the archive. So I think that when we talk about learning that history,
05:43
this is a very important resource. In the case of SOPA in particular, there's a division of archive. It's part volunteer and part run by Jason Scott there, called the archive team. And they grabbed a huge collection of web pages. That were blacked out on the protest day.
06:00
And so that's gonna be a major, major resource for future researchers. So I wanna thank them. But there are many, hold on, that slide's supposed to be a joke. So there are many key examples of activism on online speech. And I've picked these three because they encapsulate well
06:20
the rise of different major themes and formats of activism. So the parallels between the SOPA blackouts and the CDA blackouts that I hope to draw are, they're striking, even though these two campaigns were separated by 20 years. But what's really striking to me is the differences between the two.
06:40
What changes over 20 years? And then at the same time, I wanna talk about how these might take place now. So I don't think the great Tuesday campaign would be possible today, which is frustrating and I think something that we ought to examine. So beginning with SOPA, I'm not gonna go into too much detail here, because I think everyone knows about it, but I do wanna make a few points.
07:01
First, it's easy to forget kind of the sense of inevitability that a lot of people felt about SOPA, that this was something that was going to happen. And that's because beginning in 1982, the US passed 15 separate anti-piracy laws, that's one every two years for three decades. And the media lobby is a powerful lobby and it was pushing for these laws.
07:24
And the public interest had basically been ignored. And so that was kind of the background against which we approached this. And the blackout tactic that ended up being so popular on so many sites, it was proposed by a lot of different people.
07:43
But Wikipedia was the first kind of major player to propose that it would black out its own site. And really it was Jimmy Whale saying that on his personal page. And he mentioned it specifically as a reference, people forget this, as a reference to something that the Italian Wikipedia had done just the previous year.
08:04
So this wasn't a new tactic. And I bring this up as a way to say that there are ways in which the SOPA protests were, they get described all the time as unprecedented. And I do think that there are ways in which they're unprecedented. But in other ways, they're very well historically established.
08:28
For this movement, beating such a powerful lobby and in such a dramatic way did a lot to galvanize the online activism community. And part of the thinking that sparked my research on this talk over the past
08:40
two years, basically since the blackout I've been thinking about this sort of thing, has been the continuing drumbeat for other issues to have, as it's described, their own SOPA moment. And it's obvious to me that we can't replicate the perfect storm that led to the SOPA protests. But if we understand from a historical perspective what did lead to that,
09:01
I think that we can come closer to capturing those forces. So just as a little bit of aftermath, in the wake of the SOPA protests, members of the activism community who'd worked on this, got together and led an effort called the Internet Defense League. And the idea was to create a cat signal that sites could embed on their website
09:24
all the time, and then in case there was an emergency, the kind of thing that Internet activists would want to get involved on. The groups behind the Internet Defense League could jump into action and remotely update the little widget. And that never really worked as planned, but
09:41
I think it's important to kind of consider it in the totality of the event. So then we have another event called Gray Tuesday, which was eight years before the Internet Blackout Day, where a lot of the web took part in an action that was centered around a mash-up album. So the Gray album, which many of you might have heard of,
10:01
it was by DJ Danger Mouse and it mashed up. The Black album by Jay-Z and the White album by The Beatles. And a really important thing, I think, is that it was considered very good. It was a really good artistic album that got album of the year awards and stuff. And he made it basically for friends. There's no way to do this legally.
10:21
And so he made it and circulated it and it ended up online. And people who were hosting it started to get take down letters from EMI, which owns the publishing and the White album. So that really frustrated a lot of the people who work on free speech issues and online, especially music issues.
10:41
And so a group called Downhill Battle decided to coordinate an action against it and they called it Gray Tuesday. And on one day, February 24th, 2004, they convinced hundreds of sites to make the album available for download or change their layout gray. And it was hugely successful.
11:00
The album on that day alone racked up enough downloads that if you calculated it the same way, it would have placed high in the billboard charts for the week. But more importantly, the album and the protest got lots of international press coverage. And so this was really a major success. And for me as a budding copyright activist, it was really formative.
11:22
And so I wanna talk later in the third section about why I think it was so successful because I think that it encapsulates a lot of the strategies that, if not the tactics that we wanna talk about. And as an aside, just because I work in copyright a lot, the album and the press around this protest really launched Danger Mouse's career.
11:43
When researching this, I found out he's won five Grammys since. So he's really in the top stratosphere of music producers and it started with something that wouldn't be considered legal. And then, so going back even further to 1996, there was a set of protests called the Black World Wide Web Protests.
12:02
And they were kind of the first internet blackouts. It was around the newly passed American law called the Communications Decency Act. And while it's hard to get, it was hard at the time to get exact numbers of how many sites were participating, it's even more difficult today. But the estimates are that it was something like 5 to 10% of all sites
12:22
on the web at the time, taking part by going black or going offline. Either for part or all of 48 hours around the time that President Clinton was set to sign the bill, he did sign the bill, and it was challenged in a lawsuit. Most of it was later declared unconstitutional and overturned.
12:42
So it's kind of a delayed victory. I don't think that was a major activism victory. But this generated a lot of attention. And so we've got the blackout, and I think that it looks very similar to the SOPA blackout. And as a historical note, it was in conjunction with this blackout that EFF in 1996 launched the Free Speech Online Blue Ribbon campaign,
13:06
which we asked people to embed in their sites. And it was unusual at the time when we said, hotlink this image, really load it from EFF.org. And the idea was that in case there was really another emergency,
13:23
EFF could remotely update it so that they could spread the news. So really, I think a lot of people didn't realize it at the time, but it's almost an exact parallel to the Internet Defense League. And this was very popular. It was throughout the late 90s and early 2000s, it was really widely embedded. And it made EFF.org one of the top ten most linked to sites on
13:44
the entire web, basically on the strength of this. So I wanna talk about context. These are the campaigns I've chosen to highlight from 20 years of activism. And there are many others I could have chosen from the list.
14:01
There are dozens or hundreds of really remarkable pieces of activism throughout those decades. One thing about these three in particular is that they're US heavy. That's what I'm most familiar with, but there have been a lot of great campaigns around the world. But I think what's important is not just knowing the facts here. It's not just a chance to think about the gray album,
14:24
if you haven't thought about it in ten years. I wanna give these things some context, because I think that without that, we forget the older efforts. And we focus too much on the wrong parts of the newer efforts. The activism community has spoken a lot about legislators all over the world who
14:41
are nervous about their proposals. And this was a phrase that got used in Washington, getting SOPA'd. That a lot of attention all at once would change it. And I think that's valid, but it's not something that we can count on legislators thinking about for very long. And personally, a little anecdote here is that for two years after the SOPA protest, that was how I would introduce myself.
15:04
I'm an activist, what do you do? Well, do you remember that day that Wikipedia was hard to access and Google had the blackout on its logo? So that's the sort of thing I do. And anecdotally, I'll tell you that it may not seem like it in this room, but people have forgotten about that. People don't really remember what exactly SOPA was or
15:24
what exactly the web did. And so I think that's something that we have to count on. And we can't really rest on our laurels for very long. Especially because if we do that, we've gotten ourselves into kind of the worst of all worlds. Because we start to lose the veneer of the general victory of free speech.
15:46
But then we're critical of ourselves, and the media and the press that do remember this are critical of our efforts. Because they're holding up kind of an unrealistic standard of what we should be aspiring to, not actually successes in these campaigns.
16:02
When you have the proper context, I think the picture is not as bleak. But we have to remember that the SOPA protests didn't show the content industry once and for all what we're capable of. They were a high point of a very particular kind of protest. But if we're looking for the next SOPA blackouts, we should be looking forward
16:24
to what kind of action will work best on the Internet and the web of 2014, not what worked best in 2012. And so that brings me to strategies. What I really think that we can get out of a historical look that includes context is an idea for what things work as strategies and not just what works as tactics.
16:46
So it shouldn't be like, blackouts, those are really effective. It should be what drove that. And I think that really the framework that works best for this is thinking about the way that activism responds to the architecture of
17:00
the system that it's in. And so that's kind of a rephrasing of Lawrence Lessig's famous quote, that code is law. And what he was saying is the sorts of speech that we're capable of is shaped by decisions that are made by engineers and architects of the platforms, that the code that they set out, it really functions as law.
17:20
But in the same way that that's true, we can also craft our speech to take advantage of the same properties in those systems. So at the same time, we can take advantage of things that we know about the people who will be taking part. So here's a simple example. I think this is simpler than some of the examples I'm talking about. That it's a decision that most social networks have as part of the way that
17:44
they're laid out, an avatar next to every post that you put on those networks. And it's another decision that users can change those avatars as frequently as they want to. And that's not an immutable fact about the way things are. It's a design decision. It's a pattern that we see over and over.
18:01
And from a cognitive perspective, people who identify with a group and see a simple action they can take to indicate their in-group status will want to do that. And so as a result, users can send a message by coordinating their avatars. And we saw that with green-tinged avatars supporting Iranian protesters and
18:22
probably even more with the human rights campaign's massive same-sex marriage action. And there, I want to encourage you to go to hrc.org slash viral, where they talk about this. And the effect of this was really huge. It moved the discussion so much. And it was really, I think this is derided as one of the most kind of
18:42
bland examples of clicktivism, changing your avatars. But it really does have an effect. And so I know that it seems like I'm overcomplicating things by taking a simple style of campaign and setting it in this framework. But I think it makes sense to use that as an example before moving on to more complex ones.
19:01
Because I want to focus on maybe a quality that we consider more fundamental to the internet and to the web. And that's articulated best by John Gilmore, who's one of the founders of EFF. And he said, in 1993, he said, the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. And this is, thank you.
19:23
When he said that, it was technically true on a really literal level. It was from a technical perspective, the network actually didn't distinguish between information that was gone because someone removed it and information that was gone because a hard drive crashed somewhere. And so it used replicated data and it would replace it.
19:45
And I think that one of the powerful things about the CDA protests is it inverted this. They took advantage of the fact that this isn't really true on the web in the same way. The public can engage in a limited self-censorship campaign, and the information
20:02
really disappears. And because of people's, you know, we have a quality called loss aversion, where we think more about, we value more things we might lose and things we might gain. And so that's a really powerful motivator. And so the CDA blackout showed people what they stood to lose and it inverted this.
20:24
And I think that's powerful. And Great Tuesday took this quality and kind of took it from another angle. And it said, okay, so this may not be strictly true on the web from a technical level, but in the network that we have today, the fact that many, many, many people have individual
20:41
sites and servers they control means that individual webmasters can choose through their human behavior to replicate that quality of the older networks. And so individual people with a site can say, as soon as the last copy of the Gray album disappears, they can put their own copy up and make it available.
21:01
And at the same time, I think the fact that this album was very good and that it wasn't available elsewhere made it more something that was better for tapping into people's loss aversion. It's a rare, concrete example of really the kind of thing that copyright threatens. Usually you have to say you have to speculate, well, if we didn't have this law, here's
21:23
the kind of thing we might have. But with the Gray album, we said, here's what we actually could have. Here's a great album that you enjoy that could go away. And I think that's a real success by the activism group that found that downhill battle, picked that out as a great example, and they put together a great campaign.
21:42
I think taking this further up to 2012, we're in a really different situation. And the web has largely become centralized in a lot of ways. Users spend more and more time on fewer and fewer sites, and a smaller percentage of
22:00
access to server space that they really control. So if you think about how Gray Tuesday might have played out today, people, for example, might have embedded a YouTube video that included a song from the Gray album on their site. But of course, that means that Google can either choose to leave it up or they can take it down, or they can make it available in some countries but not others, which I
22:22
think maybe some people in this room are familiar with. Or they can run ads against it that gives revenues directly to anybody who claims to be the rights holder, whether or not the end use might be considered a fair use or fair dealing in some countries. And in the Gray album, we may say like, okay, that's not that big a deal if EMI
22:40
gets some money off this. But if the campaign is, say, an environmental group that's repurposing ads from an oil company or a political group that's pointing out flaws in campaign ads, the idea that we depend on Google to stand up to those rights holders is kind of alarming. So at the same time, the recentralization has properties that we can exploit.
23:04
So the lobbyists that push for laws like SOPA sometimes like to frame that effort as a top-down campaign where a handful of massive Internet companies just push their will. And that's not true. It was a cooperation between a lot of people and mostly engineers at those companies.
23:23
And we eventually got those on board. But what really did help is that those companies have an enormous reach. They could reach millions of people on a single day. And that's a property of the new network. So there's a lot of reasons why I think we should be pushing for a more kind of re-decentralized web.
23:41
It's a better place for speech and it makes more sense technically and it upholds the Internet values that we really cherish. But at the same time, I think we miss major opportunities if we don't look at the qualities of the web that we have and try to use those qualities to our advantage. So I hope this quick sketch over three kind of disparate campaigns gives you a
24:05
sense for why some online campaigns work so much better than others. The ones that work use facts about the network to make points about the network. And that's a powerful thing. But while things are changing, it's also important to note that the technologies and techniques that make these campaigns possible are really old tools.
24:25
We're just getting better at using them. So, for example, working on the SOPA campaign, a major turning point was when all of the groups that were that had been talking about this set up and, you know, wait for it, a mailing list. We actually we started a mailing list and using this decades old technology, that was
24:46
kind of what enabled us to take this to the next level. And there were a bunch of mails each day. And this is really a thing that kind of changed the game. And it's old technology. And there are other things that were new and made it easier. Cheap conference calls and VoIP.
25:02
And we could also use things like GitHub and Google Docs. But so much we did, we did with tools that we knew well. And so I think that really one of the reasons why we have to learn our history is because it reminds us that we don't have to wait for better tools. We can learn to use our tools better. And what I mean is that the development that makes new campaigns possible is not
25:24
technology. It's learning from experience and is reducing the transaction costs of working together. So that's why I think learning our history is so important that we can make much more powerful campaigns when we stand on the shoulders of the activism that came before us. And this is, of course, a famous quote.
25:40
The great thing about this is that Isaac Newton said it, but so had many other people before him. So it's it's it's kind of an example of what I'm talking about. So I want to thank you for your time and I'm happy to take questions. It looks like I ran almost until the end, but maybe there's one or two questions. So thank you.
26:05
Are there any questions? But you will also be be here and you might post some questions after. Afterwords and outside of the stage.
26:23
Thank you. OK.