Note: I originally wrote this little essay as a comment on infoAnarchy, but I felt it was important enough to copy out and put on my website.
It seems to me that one of the great traps of organizing is the online petition. Rather than thinking of creative, effective ways to educate the public and demand change from the powerful, organizers often seem to think it is sufficient to put up a petition or two online and collect signatures.
There's a similar dynamic in the offline world with paper petitions. In my opinion, these petitions can be useful only under one of two circumstances:
The petition is of a legal sort where you are guaranteed a result after some amount of signatures. The most common example of this is to get a candidate or referendum on the ballot.
The petition is not seen as an end in itself, but rather a means to some more important end: educating the public about the issue of concern. Getting 50 of your friends to sign a petition because they're your friend is useless. Actually conversing with 50 people -- of whom maybe only 10 will bother to sign your petition -- is infinitely more useful, because it creates (or helps to create) an awareness of the issue which can then be built upon in the future. A powerful person can easily ignore 50,000 signatures. It's much harder for em to ignore 50 people screaming at eir door, writing individual letters, reading the newspapers for further information about the issue, or otherwise being involved somehow in the campaign.
Obviously, the first of these circumstances generally has no parallel in the online world (with certain rare exceptions which do not apply here). So, if the petition is to be useful, it will be because it is part of the second circumstance. And I don't see that happening here. The online petitions, by their nature, draw only people who are already interested. This is useless. The interested people are going to be interested if they sign a petition or not, and there's no dynamic which encourages new people to become interested.
Furthermore -- perhaps more dangerously -- people may see signing an online petition as a substitute for more effective action. Someone might not bother to write a letter to eir congresscritter if ey feels he's already made his voice known by signing a petition.
For this reason, I find it absurd that an article entitled "Abolish the DMCA" would contain nothing more than a couple of links to online petitions.
[side note: email petitions are generally even worse. See, e.g., Phil Agre's article on the subject.]
Anti-Copyright 2002 mlc. This essay may be freely pirated and quoted for non-commercial purposes. The author would appreciate being so informed.