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MoveOn.org

Tuesday, Oct 27, 1998 8:00 PM UTC

21st Log: MoveOn moves offline

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The folks behind MoveOn.org aren’t moving on just yet. A month into their project, the bipartisan group of “concerned citizens” has gathered more than 250,000 signatures on an online petition that asks the government to simply censure President Clinton and move on to more important issues.

Now they’re taking their message offline. At noon on Thursday, in 226 districts across America, volunteers from MoveOn will simultaneously present the petitions in person to members of the House of Representatives. The hope, says spokesperson Joan Blades, is that the event will inspire the representatives to take the petition seriously — and the general public to go vote responsibly.

The numbers the group has gathered are impressive: Besides the digital signatures, MoveOn has 2,000 volunteers that have distributed more than 20,000 paper pages of comments to politicians and directed 30,000 phone calls to district offices.

“Hopefully the voters are going to be thinking about this when they go to the polls, and thinking about who’s going to represent them most effectively,” says Blades. “This vote is important. We all need to be there and get our voices to be heard.”

— Janelle Brown

SALON | Oct. 29, 1998

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Millennium pundit vs. Wired

Hell hath no fury like a Y2K doomsayer scorned — or so Wired News discovered when a story it recently ran, “Y2K: The Missionary Position,” provoked the wrath of Gary North, the vociferous millennium bug expert-cum-Christian economist.

The story, by Joe Nickell, delineated concerns within some Christian organizations that scare-mongering about the year 2000 problem was running rampant in some conservative Christian groups. Although the story didn’t mention North, he immediately posted a long response on his own site calling it “smear journalism.” The response included both a link to Wired News and “substantial” excerpts of the story, according to Wired.

Wired Digital’s lawyers, in turn, sent a cease-and-desist letter demanding that North immediately remove the text because “it is a violation of federal copyright law … to quote substantially all of an article.”

Now North is crying foul, suggesting that his First Amendment rights are being quashed as part of a liberal political agenda.

Responds Wired Digital spokesperson Andrew De Vries, “There was nothing ideological about it at all. He’s posting a substantial piece of a copyrighted article without permission.”

North has removed most of the Wired text from his site, but he sounds like he’s sure he’ll have the last laugh. As he puts it on his site, “I believe that Wired and the liberal world view that sustains it have only 15 months to go. Y2K will serve as my response.”

— Janelle Brown

SALON | Oct. 29, 1998

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Chinese human rights site hacked

On Monday, the People’s Republic of China launched a Web site devoted to human rights. On Monday night, hackers from abroad — ostensibly outraged at the very notion of the autocratic communist Chinese state paying lip service to human rights — replaced the main page with a page of their own, headlined “Boycott China.”

The hackers, calling themselves “Bronc Buster” and “Zyklon,” had a few choice words to say about the state of human rights in China, and even provided links to some Western-based human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights in China. Then, as has become de rigueur in recent Web-hacking episodes, they ranted about the imprisonment of Kevin Mitnick.

The irony inherent in an official Chinese government-controlled Web site devoted to human rights, when access to Web sites about human rights in China is often blocked, hasn’t been lost on observers. But the real and more unfortunate irony is that this latest hacking episode is likely to reinforce the Chinese government’s suspicion and fear of the Internet, and will probably result in an even harsher crackdown on Internet use — and human rights.

– Andrew Leonard

SALON | Oct. 28, 1998

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Bruce Sterling’s save-the-world mailing list

Earlier this month, science fiction author Bruce Sterling announced the creation of Viridian, a new technocultural art movement. Sterling’s goal? Nothing less than saving the world from environmental Armageddon.

Sterling says he won’t actually launch Viridian until Jan. 3, 2000. The new millennium, he believes, will be eagerly receptive to new ideas. (Why Jan. 3? Well, on Jan. 1, everyone will be hung over, and on Jan. 2, nobody’s computer will work.) In the meantime, Sterling is working out the basic principles of the movement, and has set up a moderated mailing list for the “Viridian Greens” to hash out the details.

What’s it all about? Greenhouse warming, says Sterling, is undeniable to all save fools and fat cats, but previous “green” environmental attempts to change the world have failed. Sterling’s answer is to concoct a new esthetic — one that values healthy design, eschews 20th century-style waste and flourishes through distributed, collective, networked development.

Sterling has dubbed himself the movement’s “mad Pope-Emperor.” The whole scheme sounds suspiciously similar to the plot of a Sterling novel — but like Sterling’s works, it’s audacious, funny and eloquent. Interested mailing list subscribers can e-mail the man himself, at bruces@well.com.

– Andrew Leonard

SALON | Oct. 27, 1998

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A good read on Web governance

Everybody knows that the Web has no government and no ruling bodies. And yet there is an organization called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), based at MIT and headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the Web. It’s generally known, by people who pay attention to such things, that the W3C is responsible for codifying the open standards for HTML, the language of Web pages. But what else does this shadowy group do?

You can find some answers in “The Web’s Unelected Government,” a profile of the W3C by Simson Garfinkel, a Wired contributing writer, in MIT’s Technology Review. Garfinkel’s article outlines the evolution of the W3C and traces its participation in recent initiatives for Internet content filtering and privacy protection.

The piece may be a case of one arm of MIT commenting on another, but that doesn’t stop Garfinkel from presenting some fairly pointed criticism of the W3C’s decision-making structure — in which hundreds of members may advise but Berners-Lee makes the final calls. On the other hand, the W3C doesn’t have any legal authority to begin with — so if it’s a dictatorship, it’s a strangely powerless one.

— Scott Rosenberg

Andrew Leonard

Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21. More Andrew Leonard.

Friday, Sep 25, 1998 7:00 PM UTC

21st Log: Online petitions duel

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Everybody must get stoned

If Chenoweth, Hyde and Burton have read their Bibles lately, they might have experienced a twinge of conscience when they read the passage “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.” A new grass-roots campaign bubbling up on the Net called the Stones Throw Project, organized in part by members of Salon’s Table Talk discussion area, is taking its cue from that old admonition. Stones Throw urges people to send rocks to members of Congress — with the message that it’s time to stop rooting under beds for salacious scandals and to get back to the political issues that matter.

Or, as the site puts it, “Stones can be used both for building and destroying, and those who throw stones place themselves in grave danger of being exposed as hypocrites.”

The site assures concerned citizens that sending stones to all 37 members of the Judiciary Committee will set you back a mere $20. Nearly 100 people participated in the mailing list that launched the nonpartisan project, and already there have been media rock-spottings: Rep. Steven Rothman, D-N.J., told the New York Daily News that he had received one such stone.

But why stop with rocks? The Stones Throw Project also advocates sending soiled underwear and stained dresses, as well as more traditional letters to the editor. It supports anything, in fact, that might help get the rocks out of the politicians’ heads.
– Janelle Brown
SALON | Sept. 28, 1998

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Online petitions duel: Resign or move on?

Arianna Huffington is no shy butterfly when it comes to promoting her opinions, and her latest endeavor, Resignation.com, is no exception. Calling resignation “the most principled step a politician or private citizen can take,” Huffington’s new Web site marches readers through a history of resignations (from Winston Churchill to Ginger Spice) before, as a matter of course, calling for President Clinton to resign from office.

Huffington’s goal is not just to convince but to elicit action: Her site includes a form for visitors to register their views — although the only opinion that can be registered is a call for resignation. The resulting list, at last count, was 13,303 names long.

But there is also an option for the politically minded who don’t necessarily support resignation. Those who are simply tired of partisan bickering can wend their way to Huffington’s neighbors at Moveon.org and exhort Congress to “immediately censure President Clinton and Move On to pressing issues facing the country.” Although the “bipartisan group of concerned citizens” behind the Moveon.org has no conservative media darling at its helm, it has still racked up a respectable 5,505 names on its petition (as of midday Thursday).

A number of Republican senators will be disappointed to hear that there is, thus far, no high-profile “Impeach the President now!” petition circulating online. But considering the ways of the Web, it’s just a matter of time.
– Janelle Brown
SALON | Sept. 25, 1998

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Starr quote doesn’t check out

The following quote began making the rounds online this week, cheering opponents of independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr with its apparent hypocrisy:

“Public media should not contain explicit or implied descriptions of sex acts. Our society should be purged of the perverts who provide the media with pornographic material while pretending it has some redeeming social value under the public’s ‘right to know.’”
– Kenneth Starr, 1987, “60 Minutes” interview with Diane Sawyer

Sawyer did in fact anchor “60 Minutes” from 1984 to 1989, when she moved to ABC. Why might Starr have been interviewed in 1987? As a U.S. Court of Appeals judge, he had ruled that spring in a case brought by CBS. His decision stated that FBI “rap sheets” were not exempt from Freedom of Information Act requests.

But a CBS spokesperson says the network was unable to find any such interview in its archives — and that Starr never appeared on the show in ’87. A representative for Sawyer says, “Diane has no knowlege of [the quote] at all.” So this may well be one of those instances of bogus information replicating so quickly on the Net that the facts can’t keep up.
– Fiona Morgan
SALON | Sept. 25, 1998

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Laybourne’s underwhelming “media revolution”

Geraldine Laybourne, the founder of Nickelodeon and until recently the highest female executive in Disney’s ranks, may be a bit late to the women’s Web site game, but she has certainly been outspoken about her plans to one-up her competitors. When she left Disney to found a new Web company aimed at producing sites for women and kids, she pontificated loudly that much of the content in the traditional media is stereotypical, and said in the New York Times that she, in turn, plans to “create a brand on both television and the Internet that brings humor and playfulness and a voice that makes a women say, ‘You really understand me.’”

So for those who were breathlessly waiting for the “media revolution led by women and kids” she promised in her press releases, it was a bit ironic that the first cyberspace move of Laybourne’s Oxygen Media was to take three struggling properties off AOL’s hands: Electra, Moms Online and Thrive. The three sites aren’t particularly fresh, and certainly haven’t sparked a revolution so far — according to the Industry Standard, health and fitness site Thrive’s traffic has dropped steadily for the last year, the general-interest site Electra has thus far floundered as part of AOL’s defunct Studios project and only Thrive is in Media Metrix’s top 500 Web sites.

Women.com and iVillage, the current leading “brands” in the women’s market, are looking on with bemused concern. Candace Carpenter, iVillage’s founder, snippily responded, “We were offered Electra and Moms Online, and we turned them down.” And Ellen Pack of Women.com, which will have to share space on AOL’s new Women’s Channel with the Oxygen properties, has sniffed that the three sites aren’t “anything new.”

It remains to be seen if Laybourne will follow up on her promises for unique ideas and phase out the Redbook-style content her new sites are known for. In a swamp of bland commercial sites for women, that would truly be a breath of fresh air.

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Janelle Brown is a contributing writer for Salon. More Janelle Brown.

Page 14 of 14 in MoveOn.org

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