The biggest Kickstarter in the world is still Congress. From This American Life:

I needed to bring in ten to fifteen thousand dollars a day [for two years]

Think about that. One congressman. $10K-$15K a day to get reelected. Not to build something. Not to create infrastructure. It’s to run ads to buy votes from people that do not understand what they vote for.

Another great one about the return on investment for a giant corporate tax break called the American Jobs Creation Act¹:

22,000%. So For every dollar on average these firms spent on tax lobbying they received $220 in tax benefits from this repatriation provision.

Capitalism will always win at the expense of democracy. After all of the SOPA/PIPA wrangling, RIAA was handed control of the US internet by ISPs instead of the government.

The Research Works Act is dead. As with SOPA and PIPA, I attribute this to the existence of an open and unfettered internet. The major publishers of scientific papers paid big money to pass this legislation. It was mobilization of a large number of academic institutions and professors that killed it. I, personally, do not believe this could have been accomplished in such a short amount of time without the internet.

By way of In the Pipeline

BBC has a story about the rise of tent camps around America.

For some people, austerity is the unescapable burden of being born poor.

By way of BoingBoing

From Techdirt. Let’s all remember what the FTC is really for.

A quick followup to my pompous piece on the power of the Internet. Techdirt has a post about how Google was late to the SOPA/PIPA fight and that it was mostly grassroots groups that pushed it back.

Techdirt has recently transformed into the go-to source for copy-fighting news. Superb work that is thoroughly referenced.

This year has demonstrated a new and unprecedented power in the world. A power that can define a social standard overnight. These social standards range from broad issues of personal destiny to expectations of accountability in business and journalism. The Internet has come into its own and is a force to be reckoned with.

The Arab Spring was mobilized around a unified expression of freedom. This expression was not defined in a committee or in back room dealings. The Arab Spring was at least partially mobilized over social networks on the Internet. By the time some dictatorships realized what was happening it was already too late. Even shutting off the Internet could not stop what had started. Perhaps the Internet only played an incidental role in these revolutions but it’s effect is difficult to dispute.

When “Big Media” attempted to redefine the Internet to further increase its riches, there was swift and vicious response against GoDaddy and anyone that supported SOPA and PIPA. To me, this was a quick re-defining of a new social standard by millions of small voices. Often, what is right or wrong is defined by a cultural heritage bound by generations of people testing limits and suffering consequences. The Internet age has changed the time scale. Today, right and wrong can be decided in hours.

A few days ago the Komen Foundation announced plans to cancel funding for Planned Parenthood. Even a decade ago, this would have been met with a few angry phone calls but ultimately the implications would only be felt years later. In today’s world, the Komen foundation announced, defended, retracted and apologized within a few days. Large groups of people organized on social networks and blogs to define a new social standard and exercised their power immediately.

This immense power is not just directed at Titans. Retribution has recently been directed at Violet Blue, an insignificant sort of writer plentiful on the Internet. Ms. Blue made the mistake of reporting without investigating and getting caught. She was aiming for a sensational headline about the tragedy of the Macworld show. Instead, she made a spectacular show of her own tragedy. Within a day of the exposure, the same power that brought down dictators and senators was unloaded on a minor writer. Ms. Blue is mistaken when she concludes this is about fanboy-ism. I think what she has seen is hostility toward the state of media. I can only speak for myself, but my tolerance for lies and deception in the media has reached a limit. I doubt I’m alone. What Ms. Blue experienced was a backlash from a group that can, and does, decide right and wrong within minutes. A group that can define a social standard without the necessity for precedent or authority.

On the whole, I think the Internet is the next step in cultural evolution. It’s creating communities out of people thousands of miles away. It’s empowering people that would have never had a voice at any other time in history. I think an unanticipated¹ consequence is the rapid and absolute responses towards perceived wrongs. I’m not sure it that is bad, but I am sure everyone should start thinking about consequences a bit more.

Could anyone even imagine an Occupy protest of this scale? If there were, I seriously doubt that our “Democracy” would behave as well as the corrupt Russian government is right now. We’ve developed the subtle art of turning non-lethal weapons against protestors in creative and lethal ways.