You knew this was coming, didn’t you? In the victory against SOPA and PIPA, advocates for the free and open Internet successfully fended off censorship imposed by government; now we are reminded that there’s nothing preventing online social networks from censoring themselves as the cost of doing business. From the New York Times:

[T]his week, in a sort of coming-of-age moment, Twitter announced that upon request, it would block certain messages in countries where they were deemed illegal. The move immediately prompted outcry, argument and even calls for a boycott from some users.

Twitter in turn sought to explain that this was the best way to comply with the laws of different countries. And the whole episode, swiftly amplified worldwide through Twitter itself, offered a telling glimpse into what happens when a scrappy Internet start-up tries to become a multinational business.

“Thank you for the #censorship, #twitter, with love from the governments of #Syria, #Bahrain, #Iran, #Turkey, #China, #Saudi and friends,” wrote Björn Nillson, a user in Sweden. [...]

The announcement signals the choice that a service like Twitter has to make about its own existence: Should it be more of a free-speech tool that can be used in defiance of governments, as happened during the Arab Spring protests, or a commercial venture that necessarily must obey the laws of the lands where it seeks to attract customers and eventually make money?

Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School and author of “The Master Switch,” said the changes could undermine the usefulness of Twitter in authoritarian countries.

“I don’t fault them for wanting to run a normal business,” he said. “It does suggest someone or something else needs to take Twitter’s place as a political tool.”

Color me utterly unsurprised. As I wrote in an earlier post:

I’ve always found it ironic and a little disturbing that the democratic flowering of free speech that we see on Twitter and Facebook is taking place on a decidedly undemocratic, corporate platform. In a panel on the Internet and the Arab world, [Micah] Sifry and other panelists note this as well:

The role and responsibility of social networks was debated by the panelists, with Sifry saying, “I’m terrified that we’re relying on these corporate entities to enable this kind of activity. It’s very dangerous. There’s really no reason they have to be socially responsible at all. Their responsibility is to the bottom line. Twitter did not have to inform its users that the Justice Department was seeking all of their IP information in this WikiLeaks situation. They’re under no obligation to tell you. How do we get out of conducting vital public discourse, organizing, on a corporate foundation? [...]

We’re all dancing on a rug owned by others, with no guarantee that the owners won’t someday pull it out from under us.

It seems as if that day is sooner than we think, if indeed it hasn’t come already.

So my question still stands: how do we avoid depending on corporations — like Twitter, and, for that matter, WordPress — for our free speech? How do we keep the people’s voices free?

(Image via PC Mag)

Time for another grab-bag of links that caught my eye:

1) An NPR interview with the incomparable Judy Blume, who talks about censorship, how to inspire kids to read (and how not to), the folly of labeling authors and books according to “audience age,” and how perseverance determines a writer’s success more than talent. (Note to self: time to get to work. Again.)

2) An interview with Richard Rhodes on the scientific career of actress Hedy Lamarr, “the most beautiful woman in the world.” Fascinating stuff, and one I’ve touched on before, in a post on stereotypes and women scientists.

3) A compilation of articles written for The Nation by the late, great Christopher Hitchens, spanning 28 years (1978-2006).

4) Over the past few months my wife and I have avidly watched all seven seasons of The West Wing. Graham Sleight explains why the show is, at its heart, science fiction in spirit and impulse: “I want to argue [...] that it’s SF in a more profound sense [...] It makes an argument, as SF does, about possibility, about what can be done, and it does so by presenting us with a world already showing a change from our own.” Highly worth reading if you’re a West Wing fan.

5) A provocative New York Times essay by Susan Cain on “The Rise of the New Groupthink,” about the folly of insisting on constant collaboration and “teamwork” at the expense of creative solitude. This is happening in schools as well, as Cain points out, a fact that I personally find a bit worrying. Learning to work with others is great, but are we failing to appreciate the virtues of aloneness, of introspection?

6) Why books are made of win: the Abe Books blog, via Matador, offers a list of things you can’t do with an e-book. Including leaving it on a beach towel, throwing it across the room, and using it to press flowers and fallen leaves.

7) Carl Zimmer’s excellent profile of Neil deGrasse Tyson.

8) And finally — victory! Talking Points Memo analyzes how Netizens killed SOPA and PIPA. No doubt the advocates of censorship will try again; but those who stand for freedom of speech will be ready and waiting.

Call him a blowhard. Call him an egotist. Call him a moral hypocrite. Call him a bomb-thrower. Call him undisciplined and incapable of follow-through. Call him one of the most cynical, divisive, destructive politicians of the last few decades, the single worst thing that could happen to the Republican Party if he were nominated, and to the country if he were elected. I absolutely agree with all that.

And yet. Listen to him give this speech below, about a grand vision for space and for the renewal of American scientific ambition. And then tell me that that’s not exactly what Neil deGrasse Tyson would say (as he does, passionately, here), or Carl Sagan (who celebrated American optimism and big ideas, and wrote extensively on why colonizing space is vital to the human future):

Yes, Gingrich is playing to the Republican base and pressing the American exceptionalism pedal hard. But he’s absolutely right about the need for big goals — a lunar colony, a manned Mars mission — that can galvanize the nation, capture the imagination of the next generation, and inspire them to study and work hard to be part of it. At heart this is entirely compatible with President Obama’s call for all of us to pull together and work towards a common purpose; the continued expansion of humanity into space, I submit, is just such a purpose, one that can fire our hearts and minds and call on us to do great things.

For all the well-publicized reasons that I won’t repeat here, Gingrich is the wrong man to lead us. But even imperfect messengers, as I’ve argued, can deliver worthwhile ideas.

Robert Gonzalez at io9 lays out some compelling reasons for a permanent moon base here. NASA offers 185 more.

Update: Neil deGrasse Tyson discusses the Gingrich speech here. He points out something that Gingrich, who supposedly opposes “big government,” glosses over: that the Apollo program Gingrich so highly praises was a massive government project — and that government, not the private sector, is what has historically funded and advanced the frontiers of exploration. Yet another reason (one Tyson also explains here) why government matters.

Well done.

(via Boing Boing)

I’m awed and humbled to be in a universe where such beauty exists. That is all.

(via io9)

Not bad at all; wish he’d gone on a little longer. Better, in my opinion, than Bill Clinton’s not-incompetent sax-playing — and certainly much better than Clinton’s own attempts at singing. In any case, it’s always refreshing to see politicians exhibit something that rounds out their image in our eyes, some humanizing passion or special talent — an area in which the current Republican presidential candidates seem to fall miserably short. (By contrast, their fellow Republican Condoleezza Rice, whatever one thinks of her performance as Secretary of State, can at least play a mean piano. As could, for that matter, Richard Nixon.)

Not that any of this is a proper measure by which to judge our political leaders, of course.

The original:

Update: Aaaand it looks like President Obama has just helped Al Green make a little money: in the week since the presidential crooning, sales of “Let’s Get Together” jumped nearly five hundred percent. Talk about the power of product placement!

Word maven Patricia T. O’Conner quotes this passage from Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings and asks us simply to savor the language:

At around age six, perhaps, I was standing by myself in our front yard waiting for supper, just at that hour in a late summer day when the sun is already below the horizon and the risen full moon in the visible sky stops being chalky and begins to take on light. There comes the moment, and I saw it then, when the moon goes from flat to round. For the first time it met my eyes as a globe. The word “moon” came into my mouth as though fed to me out of a silver spoon. Held in my mouth the moon became a word. It had the roundness of a Concord grape Grandpa took off his vine and gave me to suck out of its skin and swallow whole, in Ohio.

Mmmm, yes.

The rest of O’Conner’s interview, with Leonard Lopate, here — a great discussion about beautiful words: the beautiful sounds of words, apart from their meaning. Seersucker. Jejune. Waxwing. Chevrolet. Azerbaijan. And Henry James’ favorite phrase, summer afternoon.

Yum.

Christopher Hitchens’ candidate for the most beautiful English word here.

My own favorite: susurrus, and all its variants. Loved it ever since I encountered it as a child, in Jack Prelutsky’s “The Dance of the Thirteen Skeletons.” Not the place I’d have expected to find an exquisitely lovely word, but serendipity (a lovely word itself) is a beautiful thing.

(Image by Dan Bush)

So many points here that I vigorously agree with. Patriotism, for instance, as a love not just of where one’s from, but of where one lives now — a sentiment that perhaps more easily takes root in a nation of immigrants like America. Patriotism as opposed to the unquestioning belligerence of nationalism. Patriotism that recognizes that dissent is not treason. Patriotism that remembers, and continues to cherish, the nation’s underlying ideals — even as it critiques how government and public opinion sometimes lose their way.

(Photo by Crystal Borde)

Neil Gaiman, Adam Savage, Trent Reznor, the band OK Go, and many other artists have written an open letter to Washington:

As creative professionals, we experience copyright infringement on a very personal level. Commercial piracy is deeply unfair and pervasive leaks of unreleased films and music regularly interfere with the integrity of our creations. We are grateful for the measures policymakers have enacted to protect our works.

We, along with the rest of society, have benefited immensely from a free and open Internet. It allows us to connect with our fans and reach new audiences. Using social media services like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, we can communicate directly with millions of fans and interact with them in ways that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

We fear that the broad new enforcement powers provided under SOPA and PIPA could be easily abused against legitimate services like those upon which we depend. These bills would allow entire websites to be blocked without due process, causing collateral damage to the legitimate users of the same services – artists and creators like us who would be censored as a result.

We are deeply concerned that PIPA and SOPA’s impact on piracy will be negligible compared to the potential damage that would be caused to legitimate Internet services. Online piracy is harmful and it needs to be addressed, but not at the expense of censoring creativity, stifling innovation or preventing the creation of new, lawful digital distribution methods.

We urge Congress to exercise extreme caution and ensure that the free and open Internet, upon which so many artists rely to promote and distribute their work, does not become collateral damage in the process.

See the entire letter and the full list of signees here.

More on these Internet-killing bills here and here.

Contact your representatives and make your voice heard.

(via Neil Gaiman; image via Nerd Bastards)

More reasons to fight SOPA and PIPA here.

Ultimately, as Shirky shows, this is an issue that’s larger than the Net; it’s about our right to create and share, our right to the free exchange of views and information — and it’s a right that Big Media will continue to challenge on whatever technological platform, whether on the Web or beyond. They don’t want us to be creators and remixers and sharers of content; they want us to be passive consumers, full stop.

Please contact your representatives and demand that they stand up for free expression, and against censorship. This is an issue that affects all of us. And it’s a fight we have to win.