Making it politically costly to mess with the Internet

This is a transcribed and edited interview with Evan Greer, the campaign director at Fight for the Future. This interview was recorded for the NetPosi podcast at Evan’s home in Boston, Massachusetts.

Drew: Tell me a little bit about yourself, Evan.

Evan: I’m the campaign director at Fight For The Future which is a digital rights non-profit that works to preserve the Internet as a free and open platform for freedom of expression and social change. Which is sort of a long-winded, fancy way to say that we try to stop governments and corporations from screwing up the Internet.

I am also a traveling musician and that’s actually kind of how I came into all this… through traveling around playing music about politics and about what I was seeing in the world, and doing workshops and trainings for other activists. Then wanting to do some full-time organizing work, it made a lot of sense for me to focus on the Internet. It was really hard to pick a single issues that I could dedicate all my time to, but it was really clear to me through traveling around and learning about all the awesome grassroots activism that was happening around the country and the world and how much of it depended on the Internet as a platform to get whatever their message was out or to organize events or to make things happen. For me, as someone who cares about a bunch of different things, it was a clear choice to jump in on trying to defend this thing that was so clearly at the center of so many peoples’ struggles and whatever they were working on.

Drew: Tell me more about that. Tell me what being a traveling musician was like. Do you still tour?

Evan: Yeah! I still tour a few weeks at a time over the course of a year (in the midst of campaigning and being really deeply involved in the Internet freedom movement). I dropped out of Swarthmore College and played 200 to 250 shows a year for almost 10 years. I have a 5 year old who has been to like 14 countries and 35 or 36 of the U.S. states. Being dragged around on these tours is a formative experience for any kid.

The connection with all of it for me, especially when the SOPA Strikes happened, I remember as a musician being bombarded with narratives about how the Internet is killing music, the Internet is bad for independent musicians, and the Internet is bad for culture. I was experiencing the total opposite of that. My modicum of success that I was able to have as a touring musician came from being able to show up to some random town in the Czech Republic, and have dozens of people there that knew all the words to all of my songs because they downloaded it at Archive.org or something like that. Seeing the power of this platform to give a voice to the underdogs in all these different fights, struggles, music and culture. It was amazing to see the juxtaposition of that with these narratives that I was getting from like Performer Magazine and things that were like geared towards musicians and people like me that were really trying to make it or make a living doing it.

Drew: What is SOPA? What was the SOPA Strike? And how does that relate to your music?

Evan: It doesn’t particularly relate to my music, it’s more of something I remember happening in the midst of touring and playing music. It was the first time I was like, “Oh there’s Internet activists! There’s this fight over what the Internet is going to be.” Later, as I started doing this work, my history as a musician plays into that a lot because it fuels why I care about the Internet and also makes me angry at the people that try to attack and undermine our Internet freedom in my name or claiming that they’re doing it to defend musicians or defend culture or benefit the rights of working musicians. It’s something that’s really important to me, I struggled a lot to support my family as a musician. In some ways, I did better than many people who tried really hard but in the end it just wasn’t enough to totally support my family which is part of the reason why I moved toward doing campaigning. sI think there needs to be real conversations that musicians and all creators of culture have about how to adapt to the Internet and how to figure out what the new ways are that people are going to be able to create culture in this world and support themselves doing that. The Internet is totally the best thing that ever happened to any of that, we just have to figure out how to do it right and that’s happening. It’s exciting.

Drew: Fight For The Future has made a name for itself very quickly through Internet campaigning. Tell me a little bit about your recent campaigns or projects that you’ve been proud of.

Evan: What’s exciting to us is that the Internet gives us the ability to respond to things super quickly. A lot of what we do is seeing what’s happening and seeing where there’s a conversation that tons of people are having and how we can figure out how to join the conversation and engage people in a discussion about what they can actually do about the problems that they see. Then, we give them tools that make it super fast and easy for them to do it. Our big victory and campaign over the past year was about Net Neutrality, which is the basic principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally — that big Internet companies shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate, slow down, or block content. You should be able to access everything on the Internet that is legal and open, without companies or government getting in the way.

Net Neutrality was a victory that no one thought was really possible, even allies that were close in Washington D.C. were saying, “Yeah, you know that’d be great if we could get that, but they’re too strong or there’s no way we can get it. Let’s try for a compromise.”

What we saw was that so many people cared so deeply about the Internet and felt that it was such an important part of their lives. We were able to fight for more than just a policy change, but a cultural change. That’s what was really exciting about the Net Neutrality victory. There have been several attacks on it since we won the policy that is protecting us now, but I think what we’ve seen is that we’ve shifted culture enough, we’ve shifted public opinion enough that companies are pretty nervous to unleash that type of wrath again. They’re dancing around the issue or trying to find sneaky ways to get around it, but it’s no longer cool for them to be seen as attacking Net Neutrality and they know it.

That’s a pretty major victory because policy victories are short lived, or they last as long as the current administration or the current state of affairs in Washington D.C. or elsewhere, but culture shift victories become baked into society. We can see the major changes in attitudes from LGBT issues over the past decades — and we have so much further to go — but the culture work that goes into that is going to have a much greater impact than actually winning gay marriage. The same is true when we talked about Internet policy or anything else. The victories that we’re really winning are how we’re affecting the narrative.

Over the course of the Net Neutrality fight we’ve grown a huge list of supporters, more than 1.4 million people who are taking action on campaigns. It’s exciting to see people coming to us and saying, “We’ve learned about this thing, it’s really bad and you need to do something about it.” And being able to jump in and quickly respond. Another example that’s been really important to me over the past year, is that I’ve been talking to Chelsea Manning, who’s the Wikileaks whistleblower that’s serving a 35 year sentence for exposing some of the U.S. governments’ worst abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we learned that she was facing potentially indefinite solitary confinement for some extremely minor prison infractions, like having a copy of the Vanity Fair issues with Caitlyn Jenner on the cover, or having a copy of Cosmopolitan that Chelsea herself is interviewed in, or other basic reading materials, or having a tube of expired toothpaste in her cell… We managed to launch a petition with several other organizations and we got 100,000 signatures, we put a big banner in front of the pentagon, and quickly the military moved to give her very minor disciplinary measures, like no rec. time, and she didn’t get a single day of solitary confinement. She totally credited this to the effort of activists.

I’ve supported a bunch of different political prisoners over the years and it was amazing to see the level that we’re at now with the Internet to impact a prisoner and support them quickly to avoid something so drastic. The ability to get 100,000 to speak out on something practically overnight is game changing and that’s been really exciting to see.

Drew: How do you do that? How do you get 100,000 people to take action on something like that?

Evan: So much of it is about framing. It’s not necessarily just about what we’re talking about; it’s about how we’re talking about it. That’s really what we at Fight For The Future are trying to perfect, and we’re still very much students of the Internet. The Internet is teaching us about this. You can see how things spread across the Internet, if you just sit there and watch it. Sometimes it’s amazing to note. It’s like, okay, “Every news agency is talking about the same breaking news story, but I keep seeing the same news article popping up in my feed.” That’s because that article had the best headline!

We need to figure out how to talk to people about things in ways that they: A. Want to hear about it & B. Are then engaged in it & C. Then want to tell other people about it. So much of what I do becomes about testing messages. That can range from talking to my neighbor who’s just a totally average frat-bro and asking him if certain things make sense. Or it can mean sending an email to 50,000 people one way and to 50,000 other people another way, and then measuring which one actually did better. That doesn’t just tell us how to raise more money, or get more clicks, signatures, or phone-calls. It tells us how to talk to people about things, and how to engage society in a conversation about how it can change or where it could go.