You may have heard about @THISISVT, the new Twitter account which will be operated by a different Vermont citizen each week. It was created by the state Department of Tourism in the vein of @Sweden and @NewZealand, but hopefully without the awkward moments. Picking a citizen to temporarily act as the voice of a polity is officially trending.
@THISISVT's goal of representing Vermont through the real voices of Vermonters is a noble one. But you know what's more fun? Fake voices. More specifically, the jokey Twitter accounts that come about through anthropomorphizing the creatures and machines that populate our state. They're a critical part of the Twitter ecosystem, making sure that it can't be taken too seriously in the midst of all the self-promotion and buzzwords. Sure, they're probably a waste of time — but at least they're fun! (Usually.)
Here's a brief guide to the parody accounts that populate our local Twittersphere. Give 'em a follow if you don't already.
(Note: This list does not include Twitter accounts purporting to belong to pets or newborns. Parents, please don’t pretend to be your child on social media.)
Knock knock. Who's there? Interrupting Sidewalk Plow. Interrupting Sidewalk Plow wh--- RRRRRMMMM BBBRRRRRUUMMMMM beep beep beep VVVVRRRRMMM!
— BTV Snow Dragon (@BTVSnowDragon) January 20, 2012
@BTVSnowDragon. The Burlington DPW’s cute little sidewalk-sized snowplow didn’t have much to do this past winter, so it had plenty of time to learn the art of tweeting. This little machines musings on Burlington life and plow-shaped smiley faces — :] — made it a fast favorite in local social-media circles. It’s not an official account of the Department of Public Works, but it could serve as a model for public agencies on how to creatively engage on social media — and we suspect the Snow Dragon gave its interplanetary cousin, the Mars Curiosity rover, a few tweeting tips before launch.
Phew! #BTVCleanSweep was fun but boy are my brooms tired. Thanks everyone for the sightings and photos!
— BTV Dust Bunny (@BTVDustBunny) May 4, 2012
@BTVDustBunny. Here’s @BTVSnowDragon’s warm-weather counterpart, a street sweeper. This account first popped up in the spring around the city’s annual “Operation Clean Sweep” street cleaning project, but it hasn’t quite got the cult following that the sidewalk plow does.
I believe that music education is important, but someone tell that kid with the penny whistle to shut the heck up. #btv
— BigJoeStatue (@BigJoeStatue) August 5, 2012
@BigJoeStatue. Twitter has a way of resurrecting the dead (or prematurely killing the living), but this might be the first account that gives life to a statue of a dead man. Big Joe is the newest joke Twitter account on the block, so tweets are scarce for now, but any character who's stuck permanently people-watching on Church Street has potential for high comedy.
Mud season in Vermont is really making me regret wearing these dress shoes every day.The move to Florida is inevitable
— Fmr Gov Jim Douglas (@JimDouglasVT) March 15, 2011
@JimDouglasVT. Parody accounts are a classic staple of Twitter — see @Queen_UK, @NotTildaSwinton and the all-time best Twitter account ever, @MayorEmanuel for the finest examples. In that vein, here's an account parodying Vermont's previous governor, which 7D news editor Andy Bromage wrote about last year. Sadly, this Douglas wannabe breaks Twitter rules by failing to announce its parody status and, worse, fails miserably at being funny. Maybe because Jim Douglas is the kind of milquetoast figure that's too boring to joke about?
Gertie the @vermontemu, you will be missed. R.I.P. dear friend. #emudragon4life [via @bfp_news] bfpne.ws/GWHMph
— BTV Snow Dragon (@BTVSnowDragon) March 28, 2012
@VermontEmu. Remember the emu that was running free around the Champlain Islands last year? Yeah, it had its own Twitter account, carrying on a curiously close relationship with @BTVSnowDragon. Sadly, the account was abruptly shut down when the real-life emu turned up dead. Awkward.
What's that smell? It's definitely not me.
— South Union Skunk (@SouthUnionSkunk) July 11, 2012
@SouthUnionSkunk. After repeated reports of a skunk on the loose on S. Union St., this wannabe Pepe Le Pew got an online personification of its own. Who knew skunks could be so sensitive? Or that they liked PBR so much?
So your saying I shouldn't eat them? RT @birddiva: release of rare turtles back into #LakeChamplain.http://ow.ly/5r4xd#bvt #vt #adk
— champ (@Champ_lain) June 27, 2011
@Champ_Lain. Of course the monster at the bottom of Lake Champlain is tweeting — and in true Twitter fashion, the grammar is suspect. Dear old Champ hasn't tweeted much in the past year, though in all fairness, it's tough to type with flippers.
There really should be a long bench in here. Also, about 40 more hangers. Can anyone bring some in? #Vtpoli #VermontProblems
— Statehouse Coatroom (@vtcoatroom) March 1, 2012
@vtcoatroom. Anthropomorphizing animals and machines is so last year. Now we're on to rooms. The Statehouse coatroom is where legislators and citizens famously mingle, and this account keeps followers updated on all the happenings under the Golden Dome. We're certain, though, that there's more gossip told in the coatroom that deserves to be tweeted.
Got another whimsical Twitter account we missed? Let us know in the comments.
Where's the line between the Old North End and New North End? How far does Downtown stretch? How big is the Five Sisters neighborhood?
If you think you know the answers to these questions, your expertise is needed. Burlington cartographer Bill Morris of GeoSprocket created a tool that allows you to draw the Queen City's neighborhoods as you see fit. The results from all the submissions will be aggregated to form a consensus about where the 'hoods are. This project was inspired by a similar undertaking in Boston — check that out here.
What's the point in all this? Well, besides engendering a greater sense of neighborhood pride, it's almost time again to reassess the boundaries of Burlington's seven wards. There's nothing official or binding about this project, but it could help inform redistricting decisions. If you think it's silly to lump Lakeview Terrace and the stretch of North Avenue near Waggy's in with the New North End's Ward 7, now's the time to speak up.
Give your cartography skills a shot in the embed below. Pick which area you're drawing using the neighborhood list on the right side, then plot it out on the map. Click on the map to draw the corners of your shape; you can also click and drag the white squares to adjust the shapes after you're done.
It's now a little bit easier to take a trip on the bus.
CCTA bus schedule info is now available on Google Transit. That means when you're looking for directions on Google Maps between places serviced by these bus systems, Google shows you a public transit option alongside the drive, walk and bike options.
Try it out! Enter your current address and where you want to go — Google will tell you where and when to pick up the bus, which route (or routes, in the case of transfers) to take, and what time you're expected to arrive at your location. It's important to note that this isn't realtime tracking data, so Google won't tell you where exactly your bus is along its route or if it will be late. But it does make it much easier to figure out how to take the bus efficiently, especially if you're just a casual bus rider. And it works on smartphone versions of Google Maps, too.
It's not just useful in Burlington, either. Live in, say, Waterbury? Google will give you driving or walking directions to the nearest park-and-ride and tell you when to expect a LINK bus there. And if you're traveling from Burlington to Middlebury, Google's directions transition from the CCTA to Addison County's ACTR buses, which are also on Google Transit. Easy-peasy!
Getting the CCTA on Google has been a long process dating back a few years, according to Ross Nizlek, IT and scheduling specialist for the CCTA. To integrate with Google Maps, Google needs the schedule data in a very specific format, Nizlek explains. The process includes gathering GPS coordinates for every last stop and updating how the agency stores its route data.
"What I did over a period of months was I took the bus map and guide, took Excel and I handcoded each trip," Nizlek says. The result was a bundle of data that Nizlek submitted to Google back in December. A few months after that, Google and the CCTA went back and forth hashing out the minutaie, down to confirming each stop's name and each route's designated color. Now, it's finally ready.
If you live outside of Chittenden or Addison counties, fear not. The Agency of Transportation is spearheading an effort to get Vermont's smaller, rural transit agencies integrated with Google Maps, according to Ross MacDonald, the state's public transit coordinator.
"We have a lot of small providers with just a few employees," MacDonald says. "The state will participate by bringing that technology experience and knowledge to get the state up and running [on Google Transit]." The AOT will also help communicate with Google to get schedule and route changes updated when they occur, MacDonald says. (And don't forget about Go Vermont's programs to help commuters save money and be a little greener.)
If you're hoping for, say, a smartphone app with live CCTA bus tracking, you'll have to wait a little longer. "It is something we're very excited about doing, but it is a couple years out," Nizlek says. "Right now we're consumed with the downtown transit center." Once those plans are solidified, Nizlek says to expect more progress on realtime bus info.
In the meantime, the CCTA is pressing on with more tech improvements. A few more kinks still need to be worked out, including the fact that some of the route lines appear to fly through the sky rather than follow the roads. And local developers, your turn to play is coming up: Nizlek says that the agency expects to open up its schedule data on its website later this year.
An anecdote in "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," the monologue about Apple by Mike Daisey, took on a new resonance on Saturday night. It's the part in which Daisey is in China, planning out his visit to a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen where electronics are built for Apple and other electronics companies. Daisey tells his translator that he's not a businessman — he just plans to pose as one to get into the factory. The translator, Cathy, asks him if he's going to lie. Daisey reples, "Yes, Cathy. I'm going to lie to lots of people."
When Daisey spoke that line at the Flynn Center during his performance, it seemed to hang in the air a little. Not as long as the painfully drawn-out pauses when Ira Glass was eviscerating him on "This American Life," but long enough to let it sink in. I heard a couple audience members chuckle under their breath.
Saturday night marked Daisey's second "Agony and Ecstasy" performance since "This American Life" busted him for inventing and embellishing some details about his trip to Apple's Chinese factories in his ostensibly nonfiction monologue. It was his first in a couple of weeks, since the scandal began to cool down and Daisey had a chance to rethink and rework parts of the monologue.
Sure enough, there were some differences: The guards at the factory gates didn't have guns. Daisey didn't meet a 12-year-old worker. He did not claim that someone saw his iPad turn on and called it "a kind of magic." Daisey did still say that his taxicab came to a stop at a highway exit that ended in midair.
Somewhat surprisingly, Daisey did not address the controversy directly in his monologue. It wasn't until after the show, during a Q&A with Flynn Center executive director John Killacky and UVM Lane Series director Natalie Neuert, that the scandal actually came up — and even then, no one simply said, "Mike got in trouble a few weeks back because he said untrue things on 'This American Life' and Ira Glass really didn't take kindly to it."
It felt a little odd — Daisey frequently breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience directly in his monologue, so, all things considered, I was expecting a prologue or some other mention of the brouhaha. It never came. Maybe that's all right. Daisey did take out the objectionable pieces of the monologue, so what more should we expect him to do?
And how many people in the audience — people who don't religiously listen to public radio or read the rants of professional media critics — had no idea there even was a shitstorm brewing over the past couple of weeks?
One defense Daisey has offered is that his work comes across differently in the context of journalism. This turned out to be true. The excerpt of "Agony and Ecstasy" featured on "This American Life" was a small part of Daisey's monologue. If you listen to his story about visiting China, it does sound like "journalism." But in the 90-minute-plus theatrical monologue, it's a slice of a larger work with multiple storylines — some more journalistic than others — that intertwine throughout the show.
Exaggeration happens in other parts of the piece, too — unless American business execs really do talk like Chewbacca and tech journalists really do derive sexual pleasure from Apple keynotes. (Maybe those aren't too farfetched.) But these moments of exaggeration and embellishment happen in the context of comedy, where they're excusable and perhaps necessary. But not when you're tugging your audience's heartstrings.
Those other parts of the show also endear Daisey to the audience — at least to those of us who attend as geeks and not necessarily as theater lovers. Who hasn't freaked over an Apple event that effectively relegates one of our devices to the annals of history? Or rushed out to buy a new-and-improved thing even when we're not quite sure what the improvement is? Daisey's work has been praised for exposing the conditions in overseas factories, but this part of the show seems equally important. The cycle of upgrades, trade-ins and new releases is our reality — and it's hard to see past it when you're in it. The tech blogs don't address it, not when there's a mockup of a new iPhone to speculate over.
Daisey's monologue is art, and memoir. It may not be journalism, yet it exposes truths in its own way.
I'd been thinking a lot about the Daisey affair in the time between my interview with him and Saturday night's show. I had a weird epiphany late last week that this controversy proved Daisey's thesis, in a sense. More than anything, he wants us to think about where our laptops and tablets and smartphones come from — because we never do. That's why people were so angry at Daisey for his offenses to the truth. He went there, to the factories. We put our trust in him to be the guy who knew, who saw the places where our devices came from. And it turned out to be a little bit false. But if we did know the origins of our devices, we wouldn't have been troubled about Daisey's "truthiness" — because we wouldn't need him to tell us what's going on.
It feels strange to talk about this in Vermont. We like to think of ourselves as mindful. We take pride in knowing where our food comes from. That's the way things should be. But why stop at food? Most of us spend more time using various electronic devices than we do eating. Why can't we extend the know-the-source mentality to everything else?
Even in an ideal world, it's hard to imagine our laptops and phones being made locally. (Localvore computing?) We'll probably never meet the person who built our computer, the way we meet the farmer who grew our vegetables. Maybe that's OK. But no matter what you think of Daisey, he's right that we should know more than "Made in China."
A final note: Two days before this performance, a new report confirmed that Foxconn, which operates the factories for Apple and most other electronics manufacturers in Asia, should improve working conditions in its factories. In response, Foxconn and Apple pledged to raise wages and reduce workers' hours. But Daisey and others have pointed out we've been down this road before: Apple promises to fix what it had insisted wasn't a problem, then the story drops out of the news cycle and nothing substantive actually happens.
No matter what Daisey said or didn't say, it's true that our devices are made under conditions that would not be acceptable in the United States and other developed countries. That's finally getting more coverage — in part, ironically, because of Daisey's lies.
Will things change this time? Or will everyone forget again?
Photo courtesy of Joan Marcus from a Daisey performance at the Public Theater in New York.
Vermont's tech "geekosystem," as Union Street Media founder and president Ted Adler termed it today, are still rallying to knock down a controversial tax on cloud computing.
I wrote about the debate — which pits the tax department against the state's up-and-coming software and technology industry — for Seven Days in mid-February. It's a complicated issue, as matters of tax law typically are, but the debate boils downs to this: Business leaders are balking at a new interpretation of Vermont tax law that applies a sales and use tax to software in the "cloud." That could include everything from doing your taxes with online software to logging on to an email service.
In 2010, the tax department issued a "technical bulletin" to clarify its interpretation of how cloud computing should be taxed. The department reasoned that software in the cloud wasn't all that different from software that customers used to buy at a store or download to a hard drive — and so they applied the same 6 percent sales tax to these products.
Tech industry advocates take issue on a few fronts. They think the tax could put Vermont at a competitive disadvantage with other states and would hurt small businesses, who increasingly use cloud computing in some form or another. They also take issue with the tax department's approach. The technical bulletin went into effect without any legislative oversight or public discussion. And it also applied to backward-looking audits, so some companies found themselves being penalized for not filing their taxes correctly for the past four years — despite the fact that the interpretation wasn't clarified by the department until 2010.
These were the complaints that business leaders aired today at a press conference at Dealer.com's Burlington complex.
Adler was joined at the event by Greater Burlington Industrial Corp president Frank Cioffi, Dealer.com CFO David Stetson, MyWebGrocer CFO Jerry Tarrant, Vermont Center for Emerging Technology president Dave Bradbury, and a handful of other business leaders, legislators and Shumlin administration officials. Tarrant worried about the "unintended consequences" of the cloud computing tax, while Bradbury called it "scary" and a "job and income killer."
With everyone seemingly on the same page — cloud computing tax = bad! — the group looked to the road ahead. Opponents of the cloud computing tax are hoping a legislative fix might correct the situation, and two bills are currently under consideration in Montpelier.
Sen. Vince Illuzzi (R-Essex/Orleans) authored legislation being considered on the Senate side that would give cloud computing an exemption from taxation. Meanwhile, House Ways and Means is debating a possible moratorium on the tax. Rep. Heidi Scheuermann (R-Stowe) announced at this morning's press conference that she's been assured the issue will be addressed before the end of the legislative session.
"We are intending to make sure this legislation gets over the finish line," said Secretary of Administration Jeb Spaulding, who conveyed Gov. Peter Shumlin's support for revoking the cloud computing tax.
Tracking down students and faculty "fasting" from technology this week at Saint Michael's College is easier said than done.
Email? Nope. Cellphones? They're out, too. In a neo-Luddite's take on Lent, the school is encouraging students, faculty and staff to unplug for a few days. This week's "Disconnect to Reconnect" event kicked off Monday night with a screening of "Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier" and continues this week with a panel discussion and three-day technology fast.
That means 72 hours away from computers, cellphones and video games — think truly wireless.
Anthropology professor Adrie Kusserow is not fasting right now, and did respond to an email request for an interview. She has enforced a similar ban on technology with her students for several years. She goes so far as to collect students' cellphones, which she hoards in a basket until the end of the experiment. Now, she and a group of other professors are taking the experiment campus-wide during a series of events designed to help students reflect on the impacts — good and bad — that digital media has on their lives.
"The degree of technological saturation is changing our consciousness in so many ways," says Kusserow. "Our family lives, our spiritual lives, our relationship to nature, our conceptions of time."
Kusserow actually doesn't like calling this a technology "fast" — that word has connotations of deprivation, she says, that don't necessarily line up with the emotional benefits of unplugging for a few days. She says her students, in the past, have ended up connecting and "getting fed" in ways they haven't for a long time.
Still, going cold turkey on tech might feel like deprivation for some students. Over the years, Kusserow's students have felt the "phantom vibrations" of cellphones they no longer carried. One reached for a calculator for the comfort of a cellphone-shaped object. Many reported feeling anxious or irritable, classic withdrawal symptoms that suggest technology isn't just pervasive — it's addictive; like, harder-to-resist-than-cigarettes-and-alcohol addictive.
Kusserow stands by the benefits of going tech-free, at least for a few days. As an anthropologist, she says it gives her and her students a chance to observe the tech culture with eyes wide open.
"I really think the only way to get a fresh look at your own, in this case digital, culture, is by leaving your plugged-in life and watching the natives in this culture texting away as if you’re watching them for the very first time," she says.
It's also a good opportunity for looking at one's own media habits with clear eyes, says Jerry Swope, a professor of media studies, journalism and digital arts at St. Mike's. He participated in a technology fast for one week with his students about a year ago. Instead of losing an hour or two every morning to checking emails, he says it felt good to come in, sit down, and get to work. Logging off permanently might not be feasible, or even desirable, but he has brought lessons from the fast back into his daily work life. Now on days when he needs to get down to grading, he might avoid turning his computer on first thing in the morning.
"You realize, 'You know what, the world still turns,'" says Swope. "Those people can wait a day to get a response to that email, or at least a half a day. It definitely gave me a different perspective and recalibrated my sense of immediacy."
Unplugging — even just a little — might be a good idea for Vermonters, suggests Ann DeMarle, the director of the Emergent Media Center at Champlain College. She'll be speaking on Thursday night at a panel discussion on digital media, culture and mental health. DeMarle is about as plugged in as they come: Her work at the Emergent Media Center means she's constantly thinking about social media and new technology. She also thinks that many Vermonters, for all their outdoorsy leanings, tend to be clued in on the technology front.
"Since we're geographically isolated, the way we connect to the rest of the world is digitally," she says. She points to Bernie Sanders' prolific tweets or former governor Howard Dean's pioneering use of technology in campaigning.
She has a few suggestions for Vermonters who, unlike students at St. Mike's, might not be able to unplug completely. Her most important? "Put your cell phone in your trunk [while driving]," DeMarle says. "Seriously."
This gets to another suggestion: Draw boundaries. DeMarle likes to organize her tech time. She's online in the morning, when she'll catch up on news over coffee, but then she steps away from the computer.
"You need both the information" — which DeMarle says is abundant online — "and reflection" — which can be hard to find in front of a screen. "To me, finding the balance between those two points is really important," she says.
Of course, that's easier said than done, and information overload is what drives the appeal of a tech detox. The idea isn't new. Last Father's Day, the similarly named "Disconnect to Reconnect Campaign" urged fathers to unplug for 24 unwired hours with their families. The temporary ban applied to anything with a screen — TVs, computer games, cell phones. In September 2010, one Pennsylvania university actually mandated some time offline, blocking Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and instant messaging for a week on its college campus.
Vermont comic James Sturm took the challenge a good deal further, maintaining his own 2010 Internet fast for a whopping four months. Sturm directs the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, and chronicled his "(probably) crazy plan to give up the internet" in words and comics for Slate. At the outset of his experiment, he envisioned spending more time with his family and diving into creative work with renewed concentration.
St. Mike's "Disconnect to Reconnect" event wraps up on Thursday evening with a panel discussion on digital media, culture and mental health. Panelists include DeMarle, psychologist Dr. Paul Foxman, and Saint Michael's sociologist Dr. Robert Brenneman. The panel will take place from 4:30 to 6 p.m. in St. Edmunds Hall. Just don't expect a Facebook invite any time soon.
Photo by Flickr user Cletch, used under Creative Commons license.
"Gentlemen, start your hashtags:" Ever sat up nights wondering which political party spends more time tweeting and which members of Congress do so most effectively? Me, neither.
Still, that didn't stop the social-media gurus at Edelman Digital in Washington, D.C., from lighting up the twalaxy (or "Twitter galaxy," for you newbies) with the results of its new study, "Capitol Tweets: The Yeas and Nays of the Congressional Twitterverse."
Edelman identified five metrics for measuring so-called "Twitter success — engagement, mentions, amplification, follower growth, and tweetlevel influence — and looked at the behaviors that influenced those metrics across key demographics."
Over a period of 112 days spanning from September 2 to December 25, 2011 — who Tweets on Christmas Eve? — the researchers examined 456 member handles who made a total of 59,270 tweets. During that time, the researchers found, congressionaal tweeters had more than 5.1 million followers, more than 1.3 million "mentions" and an average of 130 tweets per handle. And you thought your job was boring.
After all the numbers were crunched, guess who came out as the grand master of the 140-character word form? Vermont's own independent senator, Bernie Sanders, who ranked number one for both overall "influence" and "engagement," number three for "trust" and number four for "popularity." Imagine that: a Brooklyn-born socialist from Vermont tops the list for most engaged and influential member of Congress. That noise you're hearing is the sound of Fox News-watching heads exploding all across the heartland.
However, before Bernie's campaign flacks start printing up new 2012 campaign buttons (as per above) they may want to first take stock of who else ranked high on the list of Twitter trustworthiness. Specifically, Sen. John McCain and Rep. Eric Cantor, both Republicans, topped Bernie as more trustworthy.
What other scintillating tidbits did the Edelman study unearth? Congressional Republicans tweeted "more effectively” than Dems, got more retweets and were generally more substantive than their colleagues across the aisle. Republicans were also 3.5 times more likely to mention specific legislation in their tweets, they included 52 percent more links and nearly 60 percent more multimedia than did the Democrats.
Other generally useless details that were gleaned from the Edelman study: Congressional members from the Northeast were the most likely to have their tweets retweeted; members from the Midwest were the most likely to receive replies; members from the South were the "most vocal" and tweeted more frequently than members from other regions; and members from the West were the most popular and boasted the most followers.
One shocking result from this study: Nearly half the members' tweets included a mention of an opposing political party member, with more than half of those tweets being deemed "collaborative." Too bad that collaborative nature doesn't extend from the virtual world into the real one.
What's the takeway message for voters from all this congressional wordsturbation? In 140 characters or less, "Your tax dollars hard(ly) at work."
You may have heard about Mike Daisey by now. He's the monologuist who's spent the past year and a half performing his new monologue, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," which examines the links among Apple, industrial design and overseas manufacturing. Pieces of the monologue focusing on the harsh working conditions at Apple's Chinese factories were excerpted on "This American Life" earlier this year. It made for an incredibly compelling hour of radio.
And then this happened. Daisey made a repeat apperance on "This American Life," this time to answer to charges that he made a bunch of stuff up about his trip to the factories in China. It was compelling, too — this time in a raw, incredibly uncomfortable way as a Hulking-out Ira Glass deconstructed the lies.
After that show aired, Daisey gave a talk at Georgetown responding to the controversy (transcript here, audio here). He sounded defensive, even angry as he defended the greater impact of his work and condemned the media for focusing on him instead of the factories.
But when I spoke to him a few days later, he seemed contrite, content and ready to move on and fix his mistakes as best he could. It should be fascinating to hear him perform "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" at the Flynn Center on March 31. Will Daisey's tale still resonate emotionally with the audience? Will people still care to listen?
Click here to read the full interview with Mike Daisey.
Photo courtesy of Joan Marcus
Wednesday was the day the internet stood still to protest a pair of antipiracy bills in the U.S. Congress — and it looks like it worked. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has postponed a vote on the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), a much-criticized bill sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy.
"In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday's vote on the PROTECT I.P. Act," Reid said in a statement. This doesn't mean PIPA is dead, though — just sleeping for now. Reid, who supported the bill, praised Leahy's work on PIPA and stressed that there remains a need for strong antipiracy legislation.
In a statement of his own, Leahy said he understood Reid's decision to indefinitely postpone the vote, but he blasted his Senate colleagues for making a "knee-jerk reaction," and said that criminals are "smugly watching how the United States Senate decided it was not even worth debating how to stop the overseas criminals from draining our economy." Leahy's full statement is after the jump.
“The United States Senate has identified a problem directly affecting American jobs, American workers and American consumers. When I first came to Congress, it was the practice of the Senate to debate competing ideas to address such a problem; regrettably, that is not the practice today.
“The Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously reported the PROTECT IP Act in May. Since then, I have worked with both Senators and stakeholders to identify concerns and find meaningful ways to address them. Only when the Senate considers this legislation can we do so. In the meantime, more time will pass with jobs lost and economies hurt by foreign criminals who are stealing American intellectual property, and selling it back to American consumers. I remain committed to addressing this problem; I hope other members of Congress won’t simply stand on hollow promises to find a way to eliminate online theft by foreign rogue websites, and will instead work with me to send a bill to the President’s desk this year.
“I understand and respect Majority Leader Reid’s decision to seek consent to vitiate cloture on the motion to proceed to the PROTECT IP Act. But the day will come when the Senators who forced this move will look back and realize they made a knee-jerk reaction to a monumental problem. Somewhere in China today, in Russia today, and in many other countries that do not respect American intellectual property, criminals who do nothing but peddle in counterfeit products and stolen American content are smugly watching how the United States Senate decided it was not even worth debating how to stop the overseas criminals from draining our economy.”
Thousands of websites voluntarily shut down for the day on Wednesday to protest PIPA and its counterpart in the House of Representatives, the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. Wikipedia, Reddit, and I Can Has Cheezburger were some of the big sites that went dark, while others like Google and WordPress stayed operational but posted prominent links explaining their opposition to the bills. In Vermont, local blogs Green Mountain Daily, MiddBlog and Vermont Commons joined in the so-called "SOPA strike" on Wednesday.
The blackout appeared to have made a significant impact on legislators. According to an infographic from ProPublica, 70 legislators announced their opposition to SOPA/PIPA on Wednesday and Thursday, including some who were initally cosponsors on their respective bills. Both Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Peter Welch said that they were still undecided on the legislation last week, but both told the Burlington Free Press on Wednesday that they opposed SOPA and PIPA in their current forms. The web blackout didn't sway Leahy, though; in an interview with Vermont Public Radio yesterday, he blasted the participating sites as irresponsible and said that his legislation wouldn't affect any of the sites that were protesting.
Leahy might not be happy with today's PIPA news, but many of his constituents in Vermont are. Here's a Storify I put together on Wednesday, looking at the reaction of Vermont's Twitter community. Admittedly, Twitter is a self-selecting and decidedly pro-open-internet group, but there was nary a pro-PIPA tweet to be seen.
You may have heard about the "Shit People Say" meme that's taken the internet by storm in the past month. It began with the "Shit Girls Say" video, in which a guy dressed in drag recites stereotypically girly phrases. This went viral after a few million people said "OMG this is soooo true!" and shared it on Facebook. Next came the copycat videos, which became increasingly specific/offensive — "Shit Guys Say," "Shit Black Girls Say," "Shit Drunk Girls Say," "Shit Girls Say to Gay Guys," "Shit Middle-Aged Guys Say While Waiting In Line at the Bank," and so on.
A recent sub-genre of the "Shit People Say" meme has been the rise of the geographically focused videos, ranging from the obvious ("Shit New Yorkers Say") to the less-obvious ("Shit Austinites Say"). Fashionably late as always, there still hasn't been a Shit Vermonters Say video, but Vermont's Twitter community filled the void admirably today, beginning with @whitneyinvt. Here are a few of our favorites. Thanks for giving us an excuse to stare at Twitter instead of doing real work today, Whitney.
Do you know some shit Vermonters say? Chime in on Twitter using the hashtag #shitvterssay, or add yours in the comments of this blog post.