Matt Langer

fek:

And Tumblr! Sorry, Tumblr. But it’s true.

Ok, first of all: yes to everything Foster says here. But secondly: LOL at the comment thread??

I mean, yo, Real Talk™ or whatever, the point he’s trying to make requires only the most baseline level of brain activity to comprehend—and, idk, seems to me at least kind of obvious and/or self-evident and/or what I’d hope people would be able to reason towards on their own but apparently can’t? Which is: when following the SOPA/PIPA story (or any other one coming out of Washington!) it’s kind of important to remain together enough and self-aware enough to be able to step back and say, yes, it’s nice that these people are On My Team or whatever, but that’s it.  PERIOD.

Because when publicly traded companies (or those with venture backing that hope to one day themselves also be publicly traded companies) take a stand on an issue, people must not for a moment delude themselves into believing there’s any sort of morality play involved at all (and therefore no need for so much cheerleading and all this truly bizarre “My social network is the best social network!” bullshit I’ve seen over the last few weeks). The fact that Tumblr and Facebook and Google and others made the “right decision” is just a happy coincidence in what at the end of day boils down to nothing more than an industry battle, a money grab.

In short: Good on them for having business interests that every so often happen to conveniently align with the greater good! But: Bad on us for thinking there’s anything more than that going on here.

[Think that’s cynical? Just watch: if Leahy and Kyl manage to hammer out this search exemption, the smart money will be on everyone’s New Favorite Internet Companies suddenly doth protesting too little.]

And yet the top comment on Foster’s post is “ugh, terrible post. Thumbs Down,” to which the next commenter very literately replied “yes„ i agree. this is terrible post.” At the very worst I would’ve expected a negative comment on this post to have read something along the lines of “yeah, no duh, tell us something we don’t know.” But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised? At least considering that Internet People usually only pay attention to Washington when there’s a presidential candidate on a Shepard Fairey poster—or else when their social network of choice tells them to.

[ugh, late edit just in case for purposes of clarification seeing as the internet is full of people like the commenters on Foster’s post: I should probably point out that the individuals behind business can be—and often times are!—good people who make good decisions (like the people behind Tumblr who threw that anti-SOPA hack day—a cool thing!—or that Mark Zuckerberg guy who gave a pile of money to the struggling Newark school district—also a cool thing!). Praising individuals for doing good things should be entirely within bounds; cheerleading corporations like they’re people, on the other hand, is just, no, don’t do that.]