Alex Steffen at Worldchanging points us to Ethan Zuckerman’s superb recap of his talk at ETech. In it, he outlines his “Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism” which is both prescient and perversely hope-inspiring, making one feel more safe from government censorship.
Zuckerman’s theory goes as follows (1) create web to share research, (2) develop web to share pictures of cute cats, (3) exploit web as an activist.
Very cleverly, Zuckerman describes the process by which politically-agnostic and commercialization-focused innovation become tools of political and social activism. And, moreover, the activist’s cute-cat-exploit provides an automatic security system. On this, Zuckerman tells the story of the Tunisian government censoring this DailyMotion video.
Most Tunisians don’t identify as activists and might not be engaged with politics. But, like Americans and Europeans, they’re interested in seeing cute cats being adorable online. When the government blocks DailyMotion, it impacts a much wider swath of Tunisians than those who are politicially active. Cute cats are collateral damage when governments block sites. And even those who could care less about presidential shenanigans are made aware that their government fears online speech so much that they’re willing to censor the millions of banal videos on DailyMotion to block a few political ones.
Blocking banal content on the internet is a self-defeating proposition. It teaches people how to become dissidents - they learn to find and use anonymous proxies, which happens to be a key first step in learning how to blog anonymously. Every time you force a government to block a web 2.0 site - cutting off people’s access to cute cats - you spend political capital. Our job as online advocates is to raise that cost of censorship as high as possible.
Very fascinating stuff. I’d encourage the full article.
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