02.05.12
Petition the world’s problems away
Kristof at 22 seconds. He does all the right things.
No one epitomizes America’s vapid culture of lickspittle better than the New York Times’ Nick Kristof. (Well, maybe some others do. But it’s a lede.)
Today he’s overawed by the power of Internet petitioning in changing the world for the better.
I get five or six Internet petitions a week in my in-box. I used to sign a few of them. Now I send them all to the spam folder. Kristof isn’t so stupid that he doesn’t know how quickly Internet petitioning, whether it’s through an enabling site or through abuse of a mailing list, gets old.
Foxconn, which makes Apple’s iKit, employs over 400,000 people in its factory complex. By comparison, the population of Pasadena is about 140,000.
Do you think Apple or Foxconn will change anything because some upper middle-class shoeshiners/lovers of iKit signed a petition to demand ethical business practices?
Don’t hold your breath. Any pressure Apple feels will ultimately more to do with the series of newspaper articles the New York Times has published and the stubborn work of one man doing a show, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, in New York about it.
Kristof is all excited because he’s found some grade-schoolers in upper class Brookline, MA, who’ve used an on-line petition to shame Universal into changing its website on its Dr. Seuss-based Lorax movie to include an environmental theme. (Rats! The environmental theme-y-ness didn’t make it into the Super Bowl commercial! Fail!)
He thinks it’s a big deal. And it allows him to publicize the swell and happy childrem.
It’s small beer. Someone had a heart, or realized they could gain some p.r. at Universal. For a minute or two and only that long.
But Kristof has a habit of touring the swell places of the land, finding some group or person from the upper class, and then dutifully praising them for small and nice but unremarkable things.
Some of his examples are worth brief mention. However, some reflect reality, in showing that on-line petitions haven’t revolutionized the world.
Although the people who have launched enabling sites for them, like Change.org, have made successful businesses of it.
The opportunities for Web naming-and-shaming through Change.org caught my eye when I reported recently on sex traffickers who peddle teenage girls on Backpage.com. I learned that a petition on Change.org had gathered 86,000 signatures calling for the company to stop accepting adult ads.
My next column was about journalists being brutalized in Ethiopian prisons. A 19-year-old college freshman in Idaho, Kelsey Crow, read the column and started a petition to free those journalists — and in no time gathered more than 4,000 signatures.
Does that matter? Does Ethiopia’s prime minister, Meles Zenawi, care what a band of cyber citizens thinks of him? Skepticism is warranted, but so far Change.org petitions have seen some remarkable successes.
A few years ago Craig’s List was shamed, if that’s the word to use, into removing its adult ads section. More accurately, a southern state’s attorney general frightened them into it. However, the prostitution industry is still represented on Craig’s List, just in the personals. That’s progress.
I checked if Backpage had been shamed into removing its similar ads.
Nope. Kristof has used his position at the New York Times to pressure the firm, so any subsequent on-line petition qualifies as the pundit putting his fingers on the scale.
If Backpage eventually removes its adult advertising, it may have more to do with trouble brought to bear by a New York Times Sunday opinion writer. Kristof unleashed his opinion on Steven Hatfill after the anthrax mailings. It didn’t require an on-line petition for the FBI to read it and subsequently be moved to make Hatfill a “person of interest” in the case. Kristof was successful in publicly petitioning them, so to speak, to go after the wrong person.
Kristof mentions two other cases, the backing down of corporate giants Verizon and Bank of America over odious plans for bilking customers with new fees.
He attributes it all to on-line petitioning. I, and perhaps others, recall it a bit differently. Old media and new media were filled with really bad publicity for days. Did it all spring from one on-line petition? It stretches the credulity to write that this was so.
Just like it stretched credulity to claim that Facebook freed Egypt. A couple weeks ago people were still being shelled with tear gas. Old Hosni was gone but Egypt had stubbornly refused to transform into a European social democracy.
Kristof writes of Change.Org:
“We’re growing more each month than the total we had in the first four years,??? said Ben Rattray, 31, the founder. He said that 10,000 petitions are started each month on the site, and that each success leads to countless more copycat campaigns.
That’s a lot of petitions, 333/day. Are you feeling the ground shifting beneath your feet as people on the Internet bang their keyboards and iKit apps in outrage, vanquishing all the problems no one else has been able to deal with for decades?
Perhaps an on-line petition could have stopped OWS from being ejected from its Washington, DC, over the weekend in “nuisance abatement.” If only they had headed quickly to Change.Org.
Twitter-tweeting, Facebooking, Kristof recommends: “Please also join me on Facebook and Google+, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.”
Don’t miss a moment.
Here’s Nick, really on to something a couple months ago, spreading the wisdom through the distilled pith of Twitter:
Cyber attacks could damage the grid, banking system, air traffic, dams, etc., and already are stealing many corp secrets.
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My takeaway from a conference on cyber-terrorism: the “next 9/11? could be a cyber attack that shuts the electrical grid.
Related: From the archives on Davos Nick.