Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet (22 page)

Despite the best efforts of our plutocracy, via the off-shoring of jobs and infrastructure and the apparent willingness to let the minds of myriad young Americans go to mush by denying them the jobs and skills development that would follow from a real investment in economic recovery, the potential productive capacity of this country remains quite strong, and will for at least a bit longer. (The children are our future! Save them from debt by cutting education and social programs which imbue them with the knowledge and skills they need to live full lives and which nourish them and their families.)

This is all to say: there are already deep, longstanding ideological fissures between Labor and (a substantial subset of) Tech. When considering debates wherein these divides manifest, I’ve usually landed squarely in line with the former camp. But not at all in the instance of COICA, PIPA, and SOPA: labor’s role represented a terrible betrayal of the interests of the common American and the overwhelming majority of union members. It risked undermining the Internet—in its current form a godsend to activists for the respects in which it provides forums to inform, agitate, and organize. And it represents an at-least-partial antidote to a mainstream media that’s increasingly antagonistic towards labor, as its ownership grows ever more concentrated in the hands of a few multinational conglomerates. (This is much of why maintaining Net Neutrality is so important: without it, the Internet could quickly become yet another tool by which the already-powerful can exert, concentrate, and grow their authority by determining what content users would have access to—a counterexample to any notion that the Internet must necessarily yield a more utopian society.) And, in particular, SOPA would have thwarted precisely those portions of the Internet that most abide by and facilitate the democratic impulse: those that allow for ordinary people to post and share content of their own creation.

There’s always a symbiosis between labor and management. A company and its employees’ bargaining units will squabble over pay, benefits, and working conditions, but not beyond the point where doing so threatens to undermine the
fundamental viability of the shop. Likewise, if there’s a way to benefit a particular company or the industry of which it’s a part, labor and management will team up to try to do so. So it wasn’t a huge surprise to see many Hollywood unions line up in support of COICA, PIPA, and SOPA. In this statement from May of 2011 several entertainment industry unions used milquetoast rhetoric about protecting jobs and American consumers as they indicated support for the bill:

“As the Guilds and Unions that represent four hundred thousand creators, performers and craftspeople who create the multitude of diverse films, television programs and sound recordings that are enjoyed by billions of people around the world, we unequivocally support this bill which, by providing protection for our members’ work, clearly shows that our government will not condone or permit the wholesale looting of the American economy and American creativity and ingenuity—regardless of how that looting is disguised on the Internet to fool the American consumer.”

But the far-reaching impacts these bills would have had on rank-and-file Americans, and the lack of narrow benefit to most other union members—the notion of benefit to even Hollywood unions is certainly contestable too—made it surprising that so much of the broader labor movement weighed in in support. Not only was PIPA a priority for both Hollywood and its major unions like the Teamsters, but the analogous dynamic was playing out at the national scale, with storybook antagonists like the Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO both supportive, and even purveying joint propaganda at their various Capitol Hill lobby days. Here’s what AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka wrote in the spring of 2011:

The economic well-being of workers in the United States—jobs, income, and benefits—turns more and more on our protecting the creativity and innovation that yield world-class entertainment, cutting-edge and sustainable manufacturing and construction, and disease-ending pharmaceuticals. In a tough economic time, the PROTECT IP Act will help to protect U.S. workers and consumers against digital thieves and counterfeit scammers.

Indeed, noting organized labor’s support for the legislation was one of proponents’ mantras throughout the battle. For Democratic lawmakers, standing in opposition to organized labor is not a prospect to be taken lightly, especially if one hails from a state like Oregon with a robust activist base. Just after he made it known that he’d filibuster PIPA in the spring of 2011, Hollywood exploited the unions’ stances to try pressure Senator Wyden into standing down:

Rightwing media mogul Rupert Murdoch was one of the loudest cheerleaders for SOPA/PIPA. The real Tweet above shows Murdoch applauding the AFL-CIO’s endorsement of SOPA on January 17, 2012.

The MPAA called us anti-labor too, in a typically shrill, several-hundred word May blog posting devoted to attacking our work:

“The website
demandprogress.org
, a paid lobbying organization that promotes itself as a progressive voice, forgets that being anti-labor is hardly progressive.”

It’s hard to know what the phrase “paid lobbying organization” is supposed to imply, coming from an organization whose executive director was paid $1.5 million in 2011—or about six times as much as Demand Progress’s entire annual budget that year.

Demand Progress and Don’t Censor the Net quickly penned an op-ed for the Sunday Portland
Oregonian
, which posited our cross-ideological coalition as a counterweight to anti-Wyden collusion by Labor and the Chamber of Commerce.

And then things just got silly, as unions concocted ever more far-fetched pleas for support for SOPA/PIPA. I had a laugh with a prominent local union activist and member of the International Association of Fire Fighters after the IAFF released a letter in support of the legislation. “At the local level cities make tough choices every day, and lost tax revenue means fewer police officers and firefighters. First responders ought not to have to worry about losing their jobs on account of foreign based criminals counterfeiting goods and deceiving U.S. consumers online.” The letter continued, “Counterfeit batteries, gloves, brake pads, fire alarms, tourniquets, and fire extinguishers put us as risk.” The national Fraternal Order of Police joined the party around the same time. We tried to guess at what sort of deals must have been cut to elicit this degree of absurd support.

Labor’s support for SOPA/PIPA was by no means uniform: institutional leadership tended to support the bills, but without exception, actual rank-and-file union members and organizers whom I spoke to were aghast to learn of the work that labor officials were undertaking in their names.

And even some institutional players broke free from the apparent pro-SOPA/PIPA consensus. One unsung hero of this story is the Writers Guild of America, West, which in 2007 had gained the nation’s attention and sympathy when its members went on strike over DVD and new media residuals. (The Content Industry might point to the plight of its workers as it tries to railroad through Internet censorship legislation or sues teenagers for downloading music, but one need look no further than the writers’ strike or listen to any of myriad songs about exploitative record deals to gain a sense of just how much esteem and concern Hollywood or the record labels really have for the creators who’ve made them rich.)

The WGAW was strongly supportive of Net Neutrality regulations, and so had representatives on various media reform listservs that we used to communicate with other organizers over the course of the SOPA/PIPA battle. When someone from the WGAW responded to a notice that I’d put out about a key December conference call to say that they’d join, I was initially terrified that they were taunting us—letting us know that we’d have a narc on the phone
who’d be reporting back to Hollywood. But we were pleasantly surprised, and a bit humbled, to find this update about the WGAW’s recent lobbying trip on their website even though the union had previously expressed support for PIPA:

“On the House side, Keyser and Barrios met with Reps. Henry Waxman, Howard Berman, and Janice Hahn. They thanked Waxman for his strong support of Guild issues and discussed concerns with the recently introduced Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Because Berman is a co-sponsor of SOPA, the pair discussed their concerns with the bill’s implications for competition and an open Internet. Although the WGAW strongly supports combating piracy, the competition, First Amendment, and due process concerns the bill creates must be addressed.”

During the call we took a moment to pause and recognize the WAGW’s work, and for them to be cheered by a cohort of web freedom activists that spanned the political spectrum from MoveOn to CATO.

One hopes that the WGAW’s change of heart is indicative of a broader new sentiment within organized labor, and that unions will become a consistent ally of those who seek to defend online freedoms.

There’s no reason to suspect that labor will do anything other than continue to support efforts to institute Net Neutrality regulation, and there are indications that the unions are making strides towards taking a more holistic, informed approach to Internet policy in general: several national-level activists have expressed remorse about the role that labor played during the SOPA/PIPA debacle, and the unions even proactively engaged us and other Internet freedom activists as they sought to work with us to combat attempts by the International Telecommunication Union (an agency of the United Nations, not a labor union) to assert greater, unaccountable control over the Internet this fall.

As Republicans make plays for financial support from Silicon Valley and electoral support from Americans who care about Internet freedom, Democratic partisans among us might ask that labor perform a more public expression of its contrition. They also ought reach out to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs—especially those of my generation and younger—who have had limited prior interactions with labor, might not have a complete understanding of so much good that unions have done, and, sadly, are now even more disposed to look at them skeptically.

Jonny 5, nee Jamie Laurie, is the singer for and founder of the band the Flobots. They are best known for the single “Handlebars” from their 2007 album Fight With Tools, which peaked at #15 on the Billboard 200 chart. The Flobots’ new album, “The Circle in the Square”, was released in late 2012. Laurie is a long-standing social justice activist whose affiliations include Rhode Island’s Youth in Action and the Providence Youth Student Movement, the Colorado Progressive Coalition, and many more
.

Those are the words my band, Flobots, used as a thematic centerpiece for our second album, “Survival Story.” They are meant to recognize our current state of global interdependence and transformation. The World Wide Web, clearly, is a, and perhaps the, fundamental reason for this new reality.

Ironically, another part of the new reality is that being a professional recording artist doesn’t pay what it used to. When a product is essentially free it takes a lot to convince people to buy it. A lot of people like to say, “but you make most of your money on touring, right?” Unfortunately, this we don’t. We still make it mostly on attempting to sell the music, we just make less money than we would have ten years ago. How much less? I’ve heard people say that everything has been divided by 4, but I really don’t know, and I doubt anyone does.

If our primary concern were making money, this would all be cause for alarm, but fortunately, we have bigger fish to fry. Our goal as a band has always been to create music geared toward social change, to help foster social movements, and enhance local resilience through our work. Whatever our immediate financial interests may be, an allegiance to the global democracy movement comes first.

So, in the winter of 2011 when my friend David Segal approached me about creating a YouTube video in opposition to SOPA, I knew it must be the right thing to do, because I trust David to be on the right side of things. I knew that, despite the hanging questions for artists as to how we will survive transforming music industry, the answer would never resemble the heartless clampdown on fans proposed by SOPA. I knew that fans covering our songs at school talent shows and using our music as a soundtrack to personal slideshows deserve our gratitude, not legal action. I knew that my own creative endeavor at the time (posting a new rhyme a day for 365 days in a row) relied on the fair use of instrumentals found on YouTube.