This anti-SOPA ‘go dark’ thing is so cute, too bad it won’t make one bit of difference
You’ve probably see all the posts today about how this site and that site is so against SOPA (which you are damn right that we should be) and that to re-enforce how important the matter is they are “going dark“.
The leading proponent of this has been the much publicized move by Wikipedia (our cut ‘n’ paste favorite for students world wide) to make their site inaccessible behind that rather cute graphic you see above.
Personally I think that they could have been even more effective by having Jimmy Wales’ mug up there pontificating how bad this whole SOPA and PIPA (let’s not forget this bastard child of censorship okay) was, oh and maybe send Wikipedia a couple of bucks while you’re doing your bitching.
Let’s be clear here – SOPA and PIPA are the most reactionary and dumb-witted actions that any government can take, although it shouldn’t be surprising given the current political climate in the US, and that if either, or both, of these industry written policies actually become law you can kiss the Internet good-bye and technology will be turned back to the age of the Newton, or worse.
However the idea of blocking access to some of the most visited sites in the world in order to prove a point that will be nothing but vapor tomorrow is ridiculous because the majority of ‘real people’ out there don’t know about SOPA, don’t want to know about SOPA, couldn’t careless what t heir so-called elected representatives are doing to screw with their precious Facebook.
It is kind of frightening, and sad, that it takes until today for the one site that could have had the biggest impact on this discussion to come out with a statement.
I am of course talking about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook who posted this little blurb earlier today apparently:
Two paragraph of pap and then a link to the lawyer speak version. This instead of standing up like the powerful man that he is, grow a set of balls, and tell those 800 million Facebook users exactly what is at stake.
This black out thing might look good but if you want to know what has won the fight to this point where key politicians are running scared – it was the daily pounding they are getting from places like Reddit, from leading tech blogs, and most importantly for you guys getting off your fat asses and actually telling your so-called elected official that this is not something you elected them to do and they will be remembered in the next election.
The whole black out thing is nothing more than an appeasement to our consciousness that this will make them wake up and stop this madness so I can go back to my Farmville and Twittering – someone else is taking care of the problem.
Well let me tell you just how well this whole Wikipedia blackout this is working out – or actually let me show you from the news stream of the second most powerful social network in the world (courtesy of my good friend Paul O’Flaherty).
Yup this is working out well.
Paul puts it quite nicely in his post:
Sure there will be more media coverage today in the mainstream media and a few more people will rally to the cause but tomorrow everything will go back to normal and the everyday public won’t pay any more attention to it.
I hate to say it, but as long as people care more about the size of Kim Kardashian’s ass and who’s she’s shagging then a one day outage isn’t going to make this problem go away.
That pretty well sums it up.
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About the Author
Steven Hodson Steven has been around the tech world long enough to see most of the stuff we think of cool happen before which leads to a certain bit of cynicism that has contributed to him being known as the cranky old fart of the Internet. Besides sharing some of the goodness that he finds with you here at 42x you can also find him curating some digital goodness at Winextra (tech type stuff) and Rotten Gumdrops (for your daily dose of WTF).
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