Take Back America 2006

[via Buffalo News - Bloggers take Clinton to task over her stand on Iraq War]:

Political observers still say Clinton is the overwhelming favorite for the nomination, thanks to her name recognition and the huge network of fund-raising and grass-roots support she has built on top of the network left behind by her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

But you didn't hear much of that conventional wisdom at the Take Back America conference. Instead, you heard criticism of Clinton's recent consensus-seeking comments on abortion and her support of a bill banning flag burning.

"She's alienated a lot of feminist and progressive bloggers," said Liza Sabater, who blogs at Culturekitchen.com.

BTW, there was a bit of a kerfuffle over her appearance. Representatives of CodePink were under the impression they would be able to bring in banners and posters and also interrogate Hillary during a Q&A. Toby Chadhouri, the CAF's Communications Director spinned it as a misunderstanding on the part of CodePink since they had stressed to them they 're goal was to make possible "healthy discussions" of the issues during the conferences.

My views on fair use and the future of the internet struck a major chord at the Take Back America panel on "Blogs : The new insurgency" because I spoke about the realities of blogging politics as a business and as a form of activism and was not going to bow to the pre-packaged sound bites of "we are taking back the Democratic party" or the "we have changed politics for good" that people like Matt Stoller are so ready to spechify on these conferences.

Yes, some changes have come. If you want to count the fact that the blogs published by a Puerto Rican black feminist and their contributors are getting quoted in major media; then, yeah, it's a sign of change. But it's only the beginning.

I am not going to bullshit people about what needs to be done because I am not doing this to run for office of get a job as a political consultant for candidate X. I blog because I want to go beyond effecting politics. I want to help build a network of activists who use effectively the internet for social change. The kind of change that creatively effects the very cultural infrastructure of our democracy through heavy doses of progressive libertarian dissent.

Yeah. I do want to change the world. I'm not interested in sounding good for the next job.

I had people stopping me for questions about the issues I raised there; the most important being that in order for progressives to truly empower a blog insurgency we need to own the pipelines to the internet from IP to hosting to open source companies. That there are decades of digital insurgency before the blogs came on the scene and if we don't learn from past experiences and mistakes progressives will never be able to effectively use this very itsy bitsty bit of new media to truly Take Back America.

By the way, most of the people who came to me were women. Not only did they thank me for keeping it real; but they were impressed with the fact that I was the only who could fluently talk about the technology issues surrounding blogs. That in a panel that had two guys who called themselves the face of "net neutrality" and the "netroots".

Sigh.

I will be putting up the podcast in a minute but I wanted to update you one bit of alarming news that supports my points of contention and another one that that made my whole effing year.

First the good news.

Word has gotten to me that yours truly had the Getty Images lawyers and executives panties in a bunch. I am told by my sources that they haven't had this much fun in all the years they've been working at the company. It's seems my writing about the stupidity of exclusives had the bosses internally debating their strategy and well, getting pissed off at the fact that maybe, just maybe, I made sense.

Heh.

I know from published reports on Yahoo!News that Getty Images lawyers were adamant about muscling bloggers with the DCMA (I'm too lazy to look up the link). Here's the link :

[via Shiloh Not Ready For Close-Up, Gets It Anyway - Yahoo! News]:

As for Getty Images, which Pitt and Jolie announced earlier this week would market the photos, they claim the picture could be seen more as a teaser, enticing the celeb-savvy public into seeing the rest of the shots.

"Our legal team are looking into it and we will take it from there," spokeswoman Alison Crombie told Reuters. "But I really don't think it will devalue the pictures as everyone is dying to see the full set."

I am going to speculate that they were pushed by TimeWarnerAOL lawyers to follow in on their footsteps or else. And I am going to speculate we will be hearing more about the evil TimeWarnerAOL empire now that the debate over net neutrality vs. DMCA is getting not just heated up here but exported and imposed on other countries.

Which takes me to the bad news.

As some of you well know, Jill of Feministe mixed it all up at the Personal Democracy Forum conference when she asked why weren't women invited to some of the most important plenary panels, especially the ones involving the future of tech and grassroots politics.

After the dust settled, Christian Norton of Take Back America, approached us with an open invitation to the conference. A few days later he emailed us with not just an offer to get media credentials but full access to the conference as "featured bloggers".

'Tis when I chimed in.

Although very grateful for the knock out invitation, I explained that many women bloggers have no budgets for travel or housing for events like his; HENCE their absence. It was not for a lack of interest. It's that when you don't have the financial support to get there, why bother?

So with this in mind I proposed the following : Since I usually go to these events as a speaker, if they invited me as such and gave me a room, I was more than happy to share it with as many women bloggers as I could fit in the room. I also, gave them a laundry list of women bloggers to invite which covered not just the BlogSheroes group but women from all over the blogosphere.

It was too late to include me as a speaker and he said he'd "work on it". Well work on it he did. Let's just say that Chris Norton and his colleague in righteousness, Anasa of Progressive Majority are rock stars.

We have a room, we have badges, we have a bunch of feminists going. What's kind of like the cherry on top is that, even though I was not going to be on a panel, now that Louis Pagan of Latinopundit can't make it, I will be on the bloggers plenary as well.

I'm so there.

[via Take Back America 2006 :: Conference Agenda and Speakers]: