The SOPA Blackout Created a Big Problem

[Commentary] "Going dark is cute, but, the only way SOPA dies is if the tech industry starts lobbying just as hard as the entertainment industry," Gizmodo's Mat Honan wrote. And Gawker Media's Joel Johnson tweeted, "Is it possible to appreciate protest blackouts and also think that they're mostly preaching to the choir?" Combined, the two tweets suggest support for anti-SOPA ideas, but a fear that the protests are basically useless because the target audience (Congress) won't be swayed by the blackouts. It's a sentiment that I've seen (re)tweeted in various guises over the last few days. In thinking about this critique, I recalled talking to a long-time organizer during the heat of the Occupy protests late last year. "Protests don't solve things," she told me. "Protests create problems that policymakers then have to solve." To be clear, by "create a problem," I mean to frame some set of facts and events in the world in such a way that they become a coherent bad, separate from the general messiness of the world. For web nerds, it's like dropping a shadow on text: suddenly, something is foregrounded. Much of that foregrounding isn't accomplished by the protests themselves, but by the media that spins out of such protests.