On Implementing Effective Internet Protests?

andr0meda asks: "The ecology activist group Friends of the Earth is protesting against the recent dimissal of the Kyoto Protocol by President Bush, on the grounds of protecting the current economic momentum. It is a valid reason on it's own, but given that the US is the strongest economy in the world, this is a little out of place. My question is wheather these kind of internet protests can have effect on any policy. In Inet-land, there are no stable, validated channels that are really used to examine the public opinion. You can`t strike or protest-march on the internet. There is no e-government. You can only ruin (or hope to ruin) someone's mail system or network in order to stand out from the crowd. So my issue is twofold: 1) what can you do to effectively protest on the internet without harming anyone or anything? 2) Does free-speech and subsequent opinion-chaos mean you have to break the system to augment the potential importance of your discourse? Then again, maybe I should be worried more about the Slashdot Effect on the website. (In the meantime, you are of course welcome to join in on the protest)" While the internet is great for organizing such things, I think protests are best felt in meatspace, where such actions have more weight.

Comments

Remember you're not the only one in cyberspace

[ptomblin]

A lot of recent protests that were planned on the net were quashed by massive law enforcement action. You see, law enforcement officers read the protest web sites and newsgroups too.

I suppose it would help if the people organizing the protests knew what the hell they were talking about and protesting, instead of protesting for the sake of protesting.

Simple, Really

[scotpurl]

Engage in the sort of meta-tagging and keyword placement that will keep your pages about their practices ranked higher in search engines than their own web site. Thus the public, when searching for that producer or product, will instead find your pages revealing all that the producer did not want revealed.

It's sort of the digital equivalent of an informational picket line.

Gene Sharp

[Russ Nelson]

Gene Sharp has been studying the politics of nonviolent action. There's an interview with him. Since you can't coerce someone over a T-1 line, you have to use nonviolent action. I'm a pacifist. Welcome to my world. :-)
-russ

Re:Gene Sharp

[andr0meda]

Gene Sharp has been studying the politics of nonviolent action. There's an interview with him. Since you can't coerce someone over a T-1 line, you have to use nonviolent action. I'm a pacifist. Welcome to my world. :-)

Thanks, it`s interesting to know people actually studied this. It`s a little out of date ofcourse, and the net is a new kind of world where new rules emerge. Spamming, virri and emailbombs are quite common today allready, and in some way they represent the protest acts of individuals or groups too. Some people have grown tolerant to a certain extend to these 'mallicious' acts, some take them very seriously. I`m curious how this will evolve, and where the limits and benefits really are.

Re:Ecology and Internet Logically Incompatible

[andr0meda]

First up it`s not really my cause. I just have *some* sympathy for what their ideas are.

It`s not nearly my intention to get elected, I just wanted to see if someone had some good experiences/recolections with/of non-violent protests on the internet that were effective.