Re: unitedskins.com ~ It's about time

[yael <yael@dojo.tao.ca>]

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What I meant to say was...that I think there's a major difference between
getting the government to pass laws censoring things, and defacing a web
page.  Defacing a web page, as far as I understand, is more like a
temporary prank,
like if I had a flag on my door and somebody tore it down, it'd be easy
for me to pick it up and put it back on.  But if that person wrote a
letter to some legislator demanding that it be ILLEGAL for me to have that
flag up, that would be censorship.

I have mixed feelings about people trying to get businesses to shut things
down.  On the one hand, if I am publishing something and don't want to
print something, I think this should be my right.  And if a big
corporation is getting a lot of flack and decide to not carry something, I
don't know if that's exactly censorship.  When I worked at Kinko's, we
were allowed to refuse to Xerox things if we strongly disagreed with them,
and if nobody would copy them, we would tell the customer to go to
self-serve.  This I think is different than trying to get the government
to not allow somebody to create their art (a la Mike Dianna - a clear case
of censorship). 

And as far as pages like the united skins or government pages or 
the WTO or whatever corporation you want to target, I think it's so
important to go beyond the internet.  What we see on the web is indicative of a far, far greater
problem that everybody needs to address!  The internet is only one way of
doing it, and it's not enough.  How about we use the internet to mobilize
people organize in real life?  (I know, a lot of us are already doing
this, but I don't think it can be stressed enough.)

   




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