With Today's Protests, SOPA Becomes a Mainstream Issue | Hacker News Reader

With Today's Protests, SOPA Becomes a Mainstream Issue

readwriteweb.com

Unfortunately while this is becoming a mainstream issue many news agencies are framing this as tech companies being pro-piracy. Much more unfortunately many people aren't even bothering to read the pages that are blacked out today to understand why the blackout is occurring. Looking at everything being retweeted at the below URL is a good example of this:

https://twitter.com/herpderpedia

That link is destroying my faith in mankind. I mean, seriously... I try not to be that person that walks around talking about how "the average American is about as smart as a bucket of rocks" or whatever. I generally try to be an optimist and assume that people are mostly capable and competent, albeit prone to the occasional fit of stupidity.

But reading those tweets (assuming they're all real, and that most of them were not written to be sarcastic), it's hard not to think "are all of these people f%!#ng stupid or what?" It says right on the Wikipedia blackout page that it's a 24 hour thing, but half these tweets are like "OMG is Wikipedia gone forever?!?"

WTF? Really? Can anybody read anymore? Does anybody bother to read anymore?

<rant-over />

This is not a feature of the american mind. People just don't like reading.

People will not read anything! People are governed by laziness and habit, because they are effective strategies. Modern technology only makes it worse. Being a teenager makes it even worse, and living in the richest and most 'advanced' society in the world is probably the nail in the coffin.

Lots has been written on how you can't get people to read simple instructions. That's why windows and it's cryptic dialog boxes and Yes/No questions caused so much consternation for all those years, until apple forced them to sort it out and start labelling the buttons with verbs. People might just read the headline and the verbs, but they sure won't parse the whole paragraph and decide whether they want to accept or decline the action as phrased.

The same thing goes for politics and it's obsession with soundbytes.

The word you're looking for is not "stupid" but rather "spoiled". People in first-world countries are spoiled to their bones. They take EVERYTHING for granted. Which is why they don't have the patience to read explanations why Wikipedia is down. They just want Wikipedia and they want it right now.

This comedian, Luis CK captures it much better than I can: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk

You'd think that people "in need of Wikipedia today", would read, wouldn't you?

People don't read. That's the crux of the issue. My work entails dealing with people every day. 99.9% of the errors that we have to correct are directly due to people not following instructions if they did read them, or more often not reading the instructions at all.

most of them seem to be spoiled, arrogant college students who have no practical idea of what the real world is like.

Yep.

I caught a BBC Newshour segment on it this morning, but it didn't cover the issue in-depth at all. Alexis Ohanian and an MPAA spokeswoman got equal coverage, with no mention of the fact the MPAA were the ones who bought the bill in the first place. I can't imagine what Fox will be saying.

Anyways, when I talked to family around the holidays, none of them had heard a thing about these bills. I think until today, the mainstream coverage consisted of a single 30-second CNN segment. Any coverage is better than what we had before (practically nothing). Hopefully, now it's being talked about by the media, some people will find better info online afterwards.

I wouldn't put an astroturfing campaign past the MPAA and RIAA. How many of those are newly registered or inactive accounts?

Sometimes I wonder how some people don't simply forget how to breathe. But mother nature is awesome that way: for breathing you don't have to think much.

Today, my fiancee called me and asked: "This SOPA thing. I think it's bad. Is it bad?" I hadn't mentioned it before, really. So it is definitely hitting the mainstream.

This has rekindled my hope for humanity. I used to think most people are dumb. But people are really willing to look at, think about, and act on pressing issues, if you bring it up with them directly.

Here's the message I posted on my Facebook page if you want to copy it to share with less technically aware friends:

The largest coordinated online protest in the internet's history is going on today, with the goal of stopping legislation that threatens the internet as we know it. If you think the internet is pretty cool the way it is, take a few minutes to click some of these links or at least share this post with others.

Good video explaining the bills, "SOPA" and "PIPA": http://vimeo.com/31100268

An open letter written by "83 prominent Internet inventors and engineers", strongly opposing these measures with excellent explanations: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/internet-inventors-war...

Some of the larger sites protesting today, with more details and easy ways to take action: https://www.google.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/ http://eugene.craigslist.org/ (all craigslist sites) http://www.reddit.com/ http://www.wired.com/ http://wordpress.com/ http://www.mozilla.org/ http://php.net/ http://www.rackspace.com/ http://oreilly.com/ http://boingboing.net/ http://xkcd.com/ http://blog.flickr.net/en http://www.gnu.org/ http://techcrunch.com/ http://imgur.com/ http://www.newgrounds.com/

Formatting is bad and HN isn't cooperating with post editing right now... here is the actual FB post (it's public):

http://www.facebook.com/zackham/posts/10100280245567546

This is a key first step. Now that it has some real attention we have to work to get the right information out there. At the very least people are going to be curious, hopefully they'll be turning to nerds everywhere for an explanation.

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