Today being today (wow! It worked (so far)! Even after months of eager, happy speculation, I still feel so good!), I spent a good deal of time watching C-SPAN. Not much about SOPA - the House spent the day debating a resolution of disapproval for lifting the budget cap. In other words, they'll do it, but they want to distance themselves from it. Which is fine, but they insisted on spending the entire day debating the damn thing, which really makes no sense at all ... but that's not the rant I came here to give.
Going back to C-SPAN tonight, I hear the following question posed to Pelosi (I may be slightly misquoting): "given that this is a battle between Hollywood and silicon valley, would you say you're siding with silicon valley?" Pelosi's answer was just predictable political bet-hedging and equivocation, of course; the real problem to many is that this has been seen as a battle between Hollywood and SV. The anti-SOPA/PIPA/ACTA folks don't want it seen that way (as has been discussed on HN), and it seems to me that the Hollywood folks don't benefit from the perception either. Which leaves the question: why are people stuck with this negative impression of what may be one of this decade's most important legislative battles?
To tackle this from another angle. There's a quote from "V for Vendetta" (the symbolic inspiration for anonymous) that resonates strongly with the Reddit crowd and those ideologically similar. "People should not be afraid of their government; government should be afraid of its people." It's a call to action - a call to "show them who's really in charge". And yet, historically, fear is almost never a good motivator. It drives people to do immoral, irrational, wrong things, even when those inciting fear may have good intentions. Attempting to cow the Germans after WWI was a disaster. America's "show-off" foreign policy may not have actually made enemies, but it made friends less willing to help and existing enemies more willing to be extremists. If you want to accomplish good, exploiting fear as a social force will never work for you, period.
And yet fear is, to a large extent, what drives American democracy. Fear of being kicked out in the next election. Fear of an abruptly terminated political career thanks to a poorly phrased sentence, too easily misconstrued as racist, or sexist, or anti-semitic, or socialist, or liberal, or dumb, or smart, or folksy, or elite. This, really, is the only force through which the ordinary citizen can control his/her representative: exploiting their fear of getting kicked out.
Looking at things in this light, perhaps one can better understand the way politicians act. Maybe not they're necessarily evil (as we armchair internet-pundits are so apt to presume), but simply scared. Scared of a misstep. Scared to take any sort of real stand on any issue, lest the wrath of the electorate come down upon them. Hence the perpetual equivocation. Hence today's meaningless, pointless, and downright stupid debate.
Of course, there are other important forces at work. The parties. Wealthy lobbying. Most people hate these forces, and wish their power greatly reduced - with good reason. But with fear acting as the negative force - the "thou shalt not"s of the political world - lobbying is left as the only "positive" force. The only force that provides new ideas, and a meaningful sense of direction. "Luckily" for us who don't lobby, though, our representatives are vividly aware that though their attendant lobbyists can buy them virtually unlimited television time, they still do not represent the average constituent, and exert but a limited influence over said person's desires and views. In other words, the fear - the "don't" - is necessarily stronger than the "do". And nothing can get done, unless it is done without the public noticing.
That last sentence logically implies that all that gets done, necessarily gets done behind the public's back. One of the biggest problems with modern American democracy.
Back to the first angle. Why is the SOPA/PIPA/(ACTA) battle being viewed as one between the Hollywood and Silicon Valley? Because the natural reaction, when one is scared, is to duck. And with the politicians silent in this battle the only two major voices have in fact been Hollywood and Silicon Valley. The voices of authority have been silent, making it seem to the outsider like a somewhat silly battle between two groups of out-of-touch elites. And the politicians lie in their foxholes, waiting for the storm to end.
And that's exactly what politicians will do, again and again, every time there is a storm: duck until the storm is over. It looks from the outside like a conscious tactic: wait until the public wave of disapproval has past, and then pass a slightly weakened version, very quietly. But to a politician, it's the only way to get anything done, in a climate of perpetual terror.
This cannot be fixed with more protests. This cannot be fixed with complaints. This cannot be fixed with silence. This cannot be fixed with voting. All of these mechanisms use fear as the primary agent of change - and that never works as intended. This must be fixed by creating a mechanism my which representatives can hear a positive voice - a "do" - that they can trust is representative of what the people actually want (unlike lobbying). Most of them are trying to be good people, and they will follow that voice. (Those that don't can be voted out in short order, of course.)
This is what I believe the town hall meetings were meant to do. Listening to C-SPAN today, a common meme in the House was "during town hall meetings, I heard X, Y, and Z, which I'm interpreting as A, B, and Z, and then over-generalizing because I just don't have enough data". But town hall meetings are really not working well enough. The representatives - I honestly believe - are, in fact, trying their best. But it's like being in a room, where certain actions are forbidden, some a permitted, and some are approved of, and having to guess which are approved of when the only feedback is an electric shock when doing something forbidden. (Not to mention it's a spectator sport, and people are shouting all manner of stupid non-advice.)
This is about transparency, but not being used as a disinfectant. Congress's approval rating is what, 13% now? (It got brought up three times in an hour on C-SPAN, I think.) Showing people what congress is doing wrong won't help. What's needed is a way to show congress what people actually want - without it being filtered through the mouths of lobbyists, or muddled by the Reddit hive-mind, or expressed only by way of the blunt instrument that is mass protest and exploitation of fear. A "wikipedia of political desires". I suck at coming up with catchy taglines.
Isn't this the sort of thing tech innovators are supposed to be good at? Spreading information? How does this not exist already.
(P.S. - a shout-out to Oregon's third congressional district. Blumenauer is awesome. Thank you for electing him.)
