Idle Thoughts

Getting fenced in by porn: Why #openinternet is losing.

In the years before Barack Obama took the rulebook of American politics, ripped it up, burnt the pieces and pissed on the ashes, the Democratic Party elected Howard Dean as its chairman. Dean’s legacy has been swept away by the tide of Obama’s campaign, but he was instrumental in the Democratic recovery of the US House of Representatives in the 2006 election, and his “50-state strategy” prepared the ground for Obama’s groundswell.

Some of the philosophical foundations for Howard Dean’s strategy were provided by George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics who argued that the choice of language used by politicians reinforces or weakens over-arching metaphors which the public understands, and that by using the wrong language, a politician could strengthen the metaphor of his opponents even while clouding the meaning of his own speech. I don’t particularly care for Lakoff’s particular metaphors, which reek of Freudianism, but he was absolutely correct about the concept. He called the strategy of choosing language to reinforce your metaphor “framing”.

Take, for example, the term “tax relief”, so beloved by conservative politicians on both sides of the Pacific. As the wikipedia article notes, when liberal politicians use that term, they implicitly reinforce the world-view that taxes are an affliction which people need to be relieved from, rather than a necessary part of operating a civilised, modern society.

And so it is with the campaign against the Australian governments proposal to filter the internet at the ISP level. As others have pointed out, the choice of language has been poor (“#nocleanfeed”), but I think that the campaign against ISP filtering is suffering from deeper failures than using incorrect language.

The major failing of the campaign is the absence of a metaphor. The open internet campaign has jumped from rationale to rationale in attacking the filter, jumping from democratic arguments (“it’s not a legitimate role for government to filter the internet”) to political arguments (“political horse-trading will take place, and further things could be censored”) to technological arguments (“it will slow down the net”) to pragmatic arguments (“how will the blacklist be constructed and maintained”) to even ethical arguments (“why is Conroy’s office meeting with the Australian Christian Lobby”). To expect this mish-mash to somehow filter through the sound-bite media and the idiot journalists, then percolate into a coherent and forceful public opinion is delusional. Yet that seems to be the closest thing the open internet campaign has to a strategy.

More worrying are the strategic defeats that they have suffered in the last week. The efforts of such people as Melinda Tankard-Reist, who denounced pornography, masturbation and even penises themselves on Q&A last night, combined with the spectacular own-goal scored by the Operation Titstorm half-wits, has now transformed the metaphor of the campaign.

It has become a campaign about the rights of perverts to access pornography.

I have been quite taken by this analysis on DailyKos, which argues that the strategy of framing is being counteracted by “fencing”: The construction of a philosophical or rhetorical fence around an issue or a candidate, which they then can’t escape from. The example given in the analysis is excellent: it talks about how Republicans were able to portray John Kerry as a French-loving, effete, arrogant, New England patriarch whom committed near treason against his country with his Vietnam protests. Having been fenced in so effectively, Kerry lost the 2004 presidential election.

Have no doubt: the open internet movement in this country is being fenced in, and we better do something about it quickly.