On the Death of the Clean Feed
Mar. 2nd, 2009 02:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kirby1024So yes, I'm obviously pleased as punch that the cards have lined up just so in order to stop the government from continuing with the Clean Feed.
But I have one, teensy little question.
Why, pray tell, did it have to take an unholy alliance of Liberals and Greens and Xenophon to put this thing down?
The government's own feasibility reports showed that in order to do what the government wanted, it would have to slow down Internet access in Australia by an absurd amount, and even then wouldn't even kill the main distribution channels by which the offending material gets shared on.
But they kept going on regardless.
No poll on the Clean feed from anyone showed a majority of Australians supported it. Huge swaths of child-rights groups, censorship groups, technology groups, citizens groups and other special interest groups were yelling at the government that they were doing it wrong.
But they kept going on regardless.
At every single step, the government was told "This Is Wrong, It Will Not Work, Don't Do This", and yet at every step they kept going.
What. The. Hell.
But I have one, teensy little question.
Why, pray tell, did it have to take an unholy alliance of Liberals and Greens and Xenophon to put this thing down?
The government's own feasibility reports showed that in order to do what the government wanted, it would have to slow down Internet access in Australia by an absurd amount, and even then wouldn't even kill the main distribution channels by which the offending material gets shared on.
But they kept going on regardless.
No poll on the Clean feed from anyone showed a majority of Australians supported it. Huge swaths of child-rights groups, censorship groups, technology groups, citizens groups and other special interest groups were yelling at the government that they were doing it wrong.
But they kept going on regardless.
At every single step, the government was told "This Is Wrong, It Will Not Work, Don't Do This", and yet at every step they kept going.
What. The. Hell.
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This Is Wrong, It Will Not Work, Don't Do This
Date: 2009-03-02 10:45 pm (UTC)If you're a government, you may well become so inured to people shouting "UR DOIN IT WRONG! U SUCK!" as to be effectively deaf to it, just so you can continue to do anything at all. This is obviously a Bad Thing.
I see this being a risk for Obama down the road as much as it has been for Rudd so far: If you take power on a wave of worshipful hysteria, say because you ousted some total asshole, it is way too easy to believe your own hype. No matter how good your intentions are to start with, they become destructive when you stop listening to feedback because you know you're right.