ssatva

OK, this is an activism question. I feel that some of the success of the last round of anti SOPA/PIPA campaigning was it's visibility and extremity, with big-name sites making a fuss over it. I think, based on conversations I've had with friends, that it made a lot of people who would otherwise assume this was a tech/legal issue that maybe didn't really effect them, consider that this might be A Problem, and further, it undermined the impression that these laws might be doing more good than harm. Even without fully understanding the issues, some people were able to shift it in their minds from 'this is some tech thing' to 'this could be bad,' and then they trusted the tech-savvy voices around them.

Importantly, all the sharing I did on facebook was lost on some friends, glossed over, until there was visible activism on google, and it got into the mainstream news. Then, they knew they cared.

Given that we are going to be facing endless rounds of these kinds of legal nightmares, does anyone have ideas about how to leverage this kind of visibility, without 'wearing it out' and reducing it's impact? We don't want to shut down teh webz every time this sort of thing happens, certainly, but we want to be visible on this scale, and do it over and over. Having google on our side helped. Can they be brought on board, and should they be?

In general, any thoughts about 'sustainable' visibility for this kind of activism?

Thanks for talking with us about all this! To refocus my wall-o-text a bit, and perhaps others there can throw out some ideas:

Any ideas about how we can reach people who could be allies, but who don't realize when these issues affect them? How we can reach the people who 'glaze over' if the issue seems too wonkish or technical? I find that my trying to reach them, assure them it matters, is only a little effective; if there is something 'out there' in their media awareness, they take notice. Are there ways we can start communicating more powerfully to those outside of the tech community?

Been a fan ever since watching the Are We Not men video in a record store every 15 min for 4 hours strait. I was electrified--it was a bit of an awakening moment in my young days.

State of Devolution questions:

First: it seems that we live in a time of ridiculously vast potential, for good and ill. Every day I tune in to my data sources, I get hit with new signs of immanent disaster, and new hints of possible reprieves, or even revolutions in how we monkeys do our lives. TED is fun to tour for the fear-elation roller-coaster, as just one glaring example. What do you make of this 'bees will all die and the land will be ravaged by megaweather, as we can print cancer-curing viruses and food using fusion powered molecular printers' moment we seem to be living in?

Secondly: Behavioral Economics, as described by Dan Ariely and others, seems to be pulling open the hood on how we make our stunningly terrible decisions as a species, over and over. Other cognitive science is also illuminating how we go so very wrong. Are you very aware of this work, and do you see any hope, or interesting consequences, of learning in detail how the human mind (or lack of it) really distorts and deludes itself? Is there an anti-devolutionary force building up in the wings?

Thank you for all you've done.