attention industry

Protest, Fixed.

I spend a significant amount of my time in university feeling like protest, as a concept, was severely broken. To the point where I blogged about it a few times, completed a project under the name ‘ground war’ for a communication theory seminar, and basically attended a few protests in Nathan Phillip’s square just to get a bigger feel for what the issues were, for why protest didn’t seem to work.

Shortly after I started getting more personally and academically involved in the social web, I started wondering if there was any way that could help with protest. Poking around, seeing communities, discussions, flashmobs, etc. I came to the conclusion that no, it couldn’t. The gap between badging oneself as an activist online, and actually doing something about it, fell apart.

This year, it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was wrong.

I’m not talking about the Arab Spring. While that was definitively a massive success of protest, I don’t see it as a massive success of digital protest. What got change to happen, frankly, was things getting bad enough that people were willing to risk everything to fight for change. While the internet was massively beneficial for organization, and sharing information, the actual fight happened in the streets, and it was quite literally a revolution, in most cases.

It wasn’t a facebook revolution, or a twitter revolution. These tools facilitated the flow of information, and were integral to changing worldwide opinion, and connecting individuals. But it was the people putting life, limb and livelihood on the line, in person, who made a difference.

No, I’m talking about the anti SOPA / PIPA protests that occurred recently online, and what made them different, in my mind.

Tumblr, Wikipedia and Reddit were standouts, but more than 75,000 sites did something that made a bigger difference than any online protest I had seen previously.

They generated personal, self-interested outrage, and then directed it meaningfully.

Step one was simple. Rather than saying ‘this ill-defined, unclear bad thing will happen to the future, they just DID it. They either blacked out, or pretended to black out, the content users were expecting, and SHOWED them, in no uncertain terms, what the worst case scenario of letting this bill pass was.

Crucially, they weren’t fair or balanced about it. That’s not how you drive people to action. The same ‘boston strangler’ language the content industries have been using for almost half a century is what gets a gut response. That’s how you drive action. You make it real, make it personal, and make it clear.

Wikipedia being dead? That is hard to ignore.

Step two was even better, and I think it was best handled by Tumblr. Rather than saying ‘This bad thing will happen if you don’t stop it’, they automated the next step – protest as flowchart.

Providing clear names, phone numbers, auto-populated email messages, and suggested scripts, the companies that drove this protest simplified politics, actually making sure the individual people who could have an impact understood the issue well enough to be heard.

This is something that is patently not a part of mainstream political action. It’s not about understanding complex issues of law and politics as a badge of your greatness. It’s about getting shit done, and the way to do that is to inform people.

By the end, the numbers I’ve seen suggest that almost 88,000 calls to congress were generated by the Tumblr community. Other protests generated nearly 3 million emails.

Outrage was generated, and then translated into a language government understands – personal appeals from angry, concerned, or scared constituents.

And, crucially, things didn’t need to get so bad that there were riots in the streets. This was a functional, organized, peaceful protest, and it was more powerful than one of the biggest lobbying engines in the world. This time.

So I can’t help but imagine what the semi-unified internet community could do, if it wanted to. This amount of action and outrage, spread globally, could make a sizeable dent in patent reform, or international aid, or pretty much anything.

I spent a lot of time thinking about how to fix protest, but it seems to have been figured out. Maybe we should spend some time thinking about how to apply it.