micah t collins

It appears that Tumblr built in a day or two what no D.C.-based technology supplier could come up with in the last five years.

The statement above is false. I’m one of the co-founders of Mobile Commons, though I no longer work there. The Mobile Commons technology that Tumblr used to build a very nice graphical interface has been available to any organization for going on five years. In fact, it’s been used by many organizations to lobby for the change that is important to them.

What Tumblr was able to do was remarkable because of the size and scale of it’s userbase and the ability of the Tumblr team to articulate to that userbase why SOPA is a horrible idea. The size and scale of that userbase is the result of years of work by David and the Tumblr team.

One of the issues with online advocacy and politics is to get things happening at web scale—and it’s often disappointing that the web really only rallies around causes that happen to concern the web. At the same time, it’s important. The Internet is a historical anomaly—allowed to grow and flourish because it grew too fast to ever be brought under the auspices of the FCC or anyone else (imagine if launching a site on Wi-Fi was like submitting to the Apple AppStore).

Sean Parker’s been talking quite a bit about how the web should allow us to divorce influence from money in politics. That’s a grand ambition and an important one because when it comes to SOPA, legislators are weighing the perception of votes vs. the pressure exerted on them by lobbyists. While it’s good to get apolitical people motivated en masse, there’s a lot more work that needs to be done for legislators to understand how that fits into voting profiles and their self-interest in being re-elected.

I hope that the success of Tumblr’s call-in campaign was a wake-up call to many web companies that have the technical and design wherewithal to start taking on some of these issues and working together to apply more precise and sustained pressure in Washington.

MediaShift Idea Lab . #DontBreakTheInternet: How The Web Became a Political Force vs. SOPA | PBS (via matthew)

(via christmasgorilla)

Source: pbs.org