[pnathan]

victork2 has a very good point. There is a massive disconnect between the online nerd world and the offline non-nerd world.

As a marketing strategy - and let me be clear, this is a marketing & people problem, not a technical one - you need to be able to reach the "Joe the Plumber" types. Someone who checks his facebook & email on the weekends, possibly forwarding glurge. Someone who does not own a smartphone, because they are confusing. Someone who will not get troll culture, memes and lulz, seeing them as juvenile foolery.

Put another way: a campaign like this needs to drive on many fronts, including the internet culture drive, the corporate drive, and the blue-collar drive.

[sageikosa]

Well, from my quick glance at the site, the league isn't aimed at "Joe User", but internet savvy "Lance Site-Owner" so they can show solidarity with the fight against evils to be yet illuminated by "Fight for the Future".

Basically they are trying to institutionalize a network of "like-minded" internet activists; which will at least be interesting as a sociology experiment to see how it evolves and what kinds of reaction it gets.

[pnathan]

Yes, but in order to move outside of the Lances, a different approach has to be developed. It needs not to be a geek-only campaign and instead needs to be a campaign that includes non-geeks.

Remember, most of the world are not geeks, and in a representative democracy, that means very few people in power are geeks. Geeks need to be able to communicate these socio-technical issues to non-geeks. I really hope that the Internet defence league works to communicate to the mainstream of the culture - the non-geeks - what's going on, because the mainstream is the primary driver of how we move politically (technically it's a feedback loop with the mass media playing a large part, but mainstream culture carries a large momentum and sway).

[sageikosa]

I believe the idea is that when the Committee for Public Safety decides something so heinous is about to be passed in (some?) legislature somewhere in the world (a little hazy on what will be actionable), they will fire up the cat-signal and provide updated campaign code to League members to demonstrate solidarity via a "hunger-strike" of sorts "going-dark" protest.

Not sure if the cat signal will be involved in this "final-mile" of the distributed protest action or not.