So you want to live in a world where someone thinks they can get what they want by creating an incident serious and dramatic enough to garner media attention and that will wake people up? That’s not how you get things done. In fact I’d say it’s probably counter productive.
How about you work to persuade people why your opinion of copyright law is better than the status quo? Put the work in, attract followers and funding, get big enough so your voice has real political and democratic power.
This is how you affect change. But it takes work. Making a scene might feel good and is easy but don’t have any meaningful effect.
Set aside that none of the school shootings has changed national gun policy ...
Set aside that it's unlikely the US health insurance system is unlikely to change, especially given the majority party's calls to tear down "Obamacare" and privatize more ...
There is no head, not even a symbolic one, for the current IP/copyright system.
DRM is in every fucking thing these days because many businesses profit by protecting their business model via government-granted IP monopoly.
General Jackson may have slayed the Many Headed Monster, but at least you could count the heads. When 10,000+ organizations benefit from the IP/copyright system, the hydra heads are too many for one to make a difference.
>DRM is in every fucking thing these days because many businesses profit by protecting their business model via government-granted IP monopoly.
I never argued for tearing down the IP/DRM system. I'm advocating for better restricting it to shorter periods so that the initial IP holders can profit from it for a while but not virtually indefinitely.
> Set aside that none of the school shootings has changed national gun policy ...
Because they weren't strategically targeting anything...
> Set aside that it's unlikely the US health insurance system is unlikely to change, especially given the majority party's calls to tear down "Obamacare" and privatize more ...
That's up for debate since the event happened so recently.
> Because they weren't strategically targeting anything...
There is a long history of strategically targeted killings in the US not doing anything, so you need more qualifiers than that.
Kaczynski targeted "people he believed to be advancing modern technology and the destruction of the natural environment." (quoting Wikipedia). Did that change anything?
The 1919 United States anarchist bombings targeted (if I interpret "Plain Words" correctly from the Wikipedia page) the powerful who started the class war. That didn't seem effective either.
> That's up for debate
That's kinda my point. You cannot say this is a "moment" and imply it will change anything when (so far) nothing has changed.
What do you think the change might be?
I watched Michael Moore's "Sicko" last night, after he released it for free. I found it far more powerful in convincing me the US healthcare and childcare system is totally fucked up.
Why didn't we have a Sicko moment when it was released, and what's changed?
> Kaczynski targeted "people he believed to be advancing modern technology and the destruction of the natural environment." (quoting Wikipedia). Did that change anything?
Well, maybe not much but I believe it did a little. At the very least, it contributed to a growing body of technological skepticism. And it probably did inspire Luigi Mangione, too. If Mangione's attack changes something, then indirectly Kaczynski's work changed something too.
Again, not arguing morals here, just analyzing historical facts and extrapolating.
>Kaczynski targeted "people he believed to be advancing modern technology and the destruction of the natural environment." (quoting Wikipedia). Did that change anything?
The problem with that argument is that Kaczynski targeted random innocent people who had nothing to do with the faults in the system, while Luigi targeted one of the heads(pun not intended) directly responsible for the faults with the system, which is why a lot of the people support his actions.
You may need even more qualifiers. Violent radical environmental groups currently carry out sabotage rather than targeting those directly responsible for the faults with the system, perhaps due to personal ethics, but perhaps because because they think a lot of people would not support those more violent actions.
A pro-lifer killed the doctor George Tiller, who was one of the few to carry out late-term abortions. Here too we see someone who considers the system so broken that it allows late-term abortions, and with others grateful for the murder, but we don't talk about that as a key moment.
I think the best parallel is Charles J. Guiteau's assassination of James A. Garfield in 1881 is a moment, which was a "moment" which helped the decades-long transition from the spoils system to the civil service system. Sadly, it looks like the next administration prefers going back to patronage.
BTW, I quoted how Kaczynski did not target random people (excepting, I think, Flight 444, which his Wikipedia article says he later regarded as a mistake because it was too indiscriminate.)
Actually, Kaczynski did attempt to target those responsible for failings of the system, including a geneticist, computer store owners, etc.
The reason why Kaczynski didn't have support is because he believed that all of advanced technology was a problem and of course he targeted "low-level" people compared to CEOs, and most people don't agree with his technology thesis anyway, whereas most people disagree that healthcare in the US is messed up.
How are computer store owners responsible for the societal change occurring due to technology at the time? Weren't the likes of IBM, PayPal mafia, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates the ones more likely responsible for that?
It’s not clear that insurance company CEOs are responsible for the problem. Insurance companies have rather low profit margins — even if they were non-profit, perfectly efficient, and all their employees worked for free, it would have a marginal effect on the system but not change it fundamentally.
Hollywood accounting has taught me to seriously distrust what "profit margin" means.
If company X rents a building from company Y, and X and Y are both owned by company A, then X can have no profit on the books, even though A still gets the money.
