He goes straight for the "I don't pay attention" excuse too, which I must say is an ironic habit for people who gripe about lazy slackers to have.
Point taken, though I don't pay attention... to the Brontoforums. And then I asked you to educate me anyway, as I'm interested in and respect your point but honestly don't know where it came from.
...so how does it feel being shown up by Catloaf?
Pretty neutral, as a Google check didn't reveal this list on the first page and as mentioned prior, Doom's reading of the forums is spotty at best. And it's in a thread titled after subject matter I don't care to read while also being at a glance unrelated to the current topic(Copyright thread.) It's not listed in the news articles announcing the intention of Black March or the "official" websites, in as much as a website is official for having the name and web address and being on the front page of Google.
As far as an individual actually being able to simultaneously boycott Warner, Disney, Viacom, Comcast, and Newscorp, I don't think that's sustainable short of a Unabomber-style cabin in the woods.
That isn't to say that you can't, say, manage a targeted boycott of Warner movies, music, and games for a month.
I'd like to see something small yet attainable with a very obvious goal, such as a boycott of Mass Effect 3 against Day One DLC(well, as much as the ones we can prove are hack-jobs done during development.) The all or nothing is a bit much as you get to the point where a person has literally no new stimuli, as you note.
Well, that depends what you mean.
"We" stopped SOPA. Where "we" includes Google and Wikipedia.
Ah yeah I'll just throw out what I think the big difference is between the stopping of SOPA and Internet Blackout Day and Fullmoon vomiting up a "be cool join the revo" jpg now.
Stop SOPA had a lot of great honest to god activism, like huge fanbases of things spreading the word so that their respective sites they are fanbases to would go down and such, including appealing to big-name players like Google. This leads to what makes me roll my eyes, people patting themselves on the back for not looking at cat pictures for
an entire day, and things that are very effective like constituents mass-contacting their local politicians and shit and hounding those that support the bills. So something like Black March, which is more general and smacks of the Slacktivism air, seems iffy to me. You bring up that really great list by Catloaf, sure, but why isn't that on
Black March . com? Is this the same strong, effective boycott, or a hanger-on effort by people who want to look cool with minimal effort?
I think a problem with the current generation, give or take 1(basically, the 2-3 of us growing up with the internet so directly, including those born after a time when we didn't have the internet) is that we live a very isolated and hedonistic sort of life where real sacrifice is very hard to experience unless you're absolutely dirt poor. I'd rather see people send a real, concrete message over a great period of time then see if Warner Bros notices a one month hiccup of a bunch of people not buying things in March(that they then buy in April.) I admire OWS while I roll my eyes at people who dip their toes about not going to the movies anymore.
Edit: Christ then Brentai just says it ten times better than I could. Black March is protest without a focus, Internet Blackout Day was a laser-guided effort with a lot more going on behind the scenes.