I'm stunned. Last night I almost missed a revolution. It wasn't there at 4 pm Mountain time. It was over by 2 am the next morning.
If you missed the diaries on dKos last night that commented on the uprising at Digg.com, its not surprising. They had a half life of about 2 hrs. But what happened yesterday was an amazing snapshot of how new information technology capabilities -- introduced by Elvis and Citibank in the 70s, accellerated by Bob Kahn, Vint Cerf, and Tim Berners-Lee, and given more full expression by Web 2.0 technologies, have utterly and completely changed the nature of politics as we understand it.
Here's a quick synopsis of what happened last night: in January or February, someone got hold of an encryption key that unlocks HD-DVD disks so that they can be replicated. It was picked up by a bunch of gamers on a "Doom9 board (Doom9 being the definitive site for DVD hackers)" in February, and then it slowly spread around the Net in blogs. The problem was, that the mere expression of this alphanumeric sequence could be considered illegal under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). AACS-LA, the organization that developed and manages the key, began issuing "cease-and-desist" letters to bloggers who posted the sequence.
A couple days ago, a Digg.com user posted the sequence with an explanation of the controversy.
The management of Digg.com promptly removed the posting, and banned the user. The user came back (under a new name) and explained what happened, speculating that the sponsorship of Digg.com by the HD-DVD coalition let to the rather startling act of censorship.
It was a small post that I first noticed yesterday afternoon. But by the time I checked in after dinner, it had ignited a revolution on Digg.com: every post on the first few pages of the site contained the sequence in some form or another: in photos, poems, images (there were, by one estimate, more than 50,000 interactions on this subject in less than 8 hrs. on Digg -- at night).
Further, users were supporting each other by voting up each other's blogs/postings. By the time I quit watching (at around 2am my time), the sequence could be found on over 230,000 pages indexed by Google, songs had been written and posted on YouTube containing the sequence, and it was quite clear that this particular genie was out of the bottle, in spectacular fashion.
This morning, Digg management conceded and has vowed to side with its users. Meanwhile, AACS-LA is confronted with a very daunting enforcement problem, and other industry groups with a vested interest in enforcing the DMCA are now faced with a very visible and popular uprising against the Act.
This morning, I am very proud to call myself a geek. Even more proud than last Novemeber when the American people went to the polls to stand up for themselves. I have only personally witnessed this kind of action a few times in my life and I have to say, it feels really good.
But thinking about what happened last night made me realized that the nature of politics has really, really, fundamentally, changed in ways we cannot possibly understand.
My colleagues (with whom I have been arguing this point since the 80s - scholars in classic political philosophy) would have us believe that the nature of politics cannot change since it is conducted by humans, and human nature has not changed, (Aristotle, Hobbes).
I counter that while human nature has not changed, the ability to tickle the "action triggers" embedded in human nature has changed dramatically since the 1973 and the first, real time global television broadcast (believe it or not, Elvis Presley's concert in Honolulu ushered in the age of globalization).
Further, these "action triggers" become increasingly important as demand for attention rises, cultural boundaries shift, and the conversations required to orient oneself to the Other (Levanas) are happening faster, to more people simultaneously.
The Citibank network that allowed the instantaneous, global movement of capital in the late 70s, followed by commercially available networking technologies, followed by TCP/IP, then the Web, then digital imagery/video/sound/P2P/Web2.0 .... all of these changes have fundamentally transformed how politics works. And if you don't believe it, all you need do is follow what happened last night.
dKos is one of several communities that has just begun to figure this out. What happened last night should bring a smile to the face of everyone in this community.
UPDATE: The revolt was covered by the BBC today.