So Tuesday was "The Day We Fight Back." If you missed it, a pile of sites, Reddit, Imgur, Mozilla, BoingBoing, WordPress.com, and a bunch of others, ran banners asking people to call or email their reps about NSA mass surveillance. EFF, Demand Progress, and Fight for the Future put the whole thing together, and it was pitched as a nod to Aaron Swartz, a year and change after he died, plus a follow-up to everything Snowden's been dumping into the news since last June.
I want to say I was fully on board. I wasn't, not entirely, and I've been chewing on why for two days now.
Here's my actual complaint: I put a banner on techpad. Small one, top of the sidebar, linked to the phone tool that connects you straight to your senator's office. And it felt like putting a bumper sticker on a car nobody's going to see parked in my driveway. Compare that to January 2012, when Wikipedia went fully dark and Reddit blacked itself out over SOPA and PIPA. That one had teeth because it broke something people were using right that second. You'd go to look something up on Wikipedia and instead get a full-page wall telling you why the bill was bad, and it worked, Congress backed off within days. Tuesday's thing was a banner you could scroll past in about a second and a half. I did that myself on three different sites before I caught what I was doing.
Maybe that's unfair. The problem this time isn't a bill you can kill with one loud week, it's an entire intelligence apparatus that's been operating this way for over a decade, and you can't blackout your way out of that. The USA FREEDOM Act, the bill this campaign was actually pushing people to call about, has been sitting in Congress since October without much movement, and I don't think a Tuesday of homepage banners is what moves it. I still think the organizing is worth doing. I just don't think it's worth pretending it hit the way SOPA hit.
(Small tangent: half the tech press barely covered this because everyone was still writing the fortieth "Flappy Bird is gone and people are selling their phones on eBay for four figures" post. I saw one listing Tuesday night for a phone with the app still installed going for something like $8,000. I don't understand any of it, the game, the removal, the money. I deleted mine off my own phone back in January because the flapping noise was driving me insane on the train, so I guess I missed my chance to be a weird footnote in tech history.)
What actually stuck with me from Tuesday wasn't the banners, it was a stat one of the organizers threw out, that something like six thousand websites signed on in some form. That's a real number of people who bothered to edit their site's header for one day over an issue that doesn't pay them anything and mostly annoys their readers. I don't think that's nothing. I think it's just quieter than it looks from twenty feet away, and quiet doesn't get headlines the way a blacked-out Wikipedia page does.
I keep going back and forth on whether I even believe emailing a senator does anything in 2014. I've done it three times now on three different issues and gotten back three form letters that didn't address a single specific thing I wrote. But I called anyway on Tuesday, actual phone call, actual hold music, actual staffer who took down that I was "concerned about NSA surveillance programs" and thanked me for my time. Maybe that's the whole trick. It's not really about the phone call changing one vote. It's about somebody in that office having to log "call number 40" instead of "call number 39," and eventually that number means something to somebody with actual power.
Or maybe I'm just telling myself that so the banner felt like less of a formality. Either way it's down off the sidebar now. Back to regular posting.