Power Plays in Shakespeare and on the Internet

Today many major websites and services are on strike or otherwise protesting a controversial bill, SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and its sister bill, PIPA. I have enlisted in the cause, putting a banner across my Google+ and Twitter profiles so people know where I stand on the matter. It's midday on January 18, 2012, and news is that the bills' sponsors have withdrawn them, bowing to the enormous pressure that's been exerted by the barrage of protests. When you shut down Wikipedia, people notice.

In addition to raising great concern about the influence of lobbyists and the ignorance of Congress regarding the interent, the SOPA event has unmasked the efforts by corporations to seize control of the knowledge commons in order to protect business interests. The coup was foiled, but had the bill passed, whole domains could have been shut down with little more than an accusation of infringed copyright. The result would have more than censorship; it would have made possible abuses of power while encouraging otherwise compliant netizens to make their way into the dark net where the exchange of knowledge and goods is less constrained.

Coincidentally, today Shakespeare's play, The Tempest, was banned by the Tucson School Board in Arizona,
as part of its efforts to comply with a new Arizona law that "bans classes that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, encourage resentment toward a race or class of people, are designed solely for students of a certain ethnic background and advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of students as individuals.” I'm wondering just what ethnic solidarity The Tempest advocates, but this is not the first time Shakespeare (or other literary works) have run afoul of political correctness.

A more visible theme than ethnic solidarity within Shakespeare is the critique of power. As it happens, in the The Tempest Prospero employs magic to control others, benignly, but in the end gives up his powers. He is the counterpoint to his own brother, who ousted him as Duke of Milan in a coup many years previously.

But what do we make of a hero like Henry V? Beloved of the British to this day, he was the son of Bolingbroke, who staged his own coup against Richard II. When Prince Hal became Henry V, he became an aggressor in France, using a dubious legal pretext to seize power there. However much we may love his inspiring St. Crispin's day's speech to his soldiers ("We few, we happy few..."), the fact of the matter is Henry has been an aggressive monarch exchanging the lives of his subjects for French lands.

We tend to look the other way when powerful forces work in our favor. Google has blackened its name on its search page today to protest SOPA, and yet Google's name has already been metaphorically blackened by engaging in its own power plays of many varieties. A prescient Businessweek article from 2007 asks, "Is Google Too Powerful?" Microsoft has accused it of suppressing competition in its online ads. Google has embroiled and enraged authors whose books have been digitized by Google. And these are the tip of the iceberg. As Google grows in size and internet culture grows in dependence upon the search giant, what it does or what it becomes affects commerce, politics -- the world stage. It is as though Google has become a sort of sovereign power, a leviathan, to quote Thomas Hobbes.

I would have put a link on Hobbes' name to Wikipedia, but Wikipedia is not available today. Another near sovereignty on the internet, Wikipedia, using its own great clout to pressure American politics. Just how is it that we have become the subjects to cyber-sovereignties like Google and Wikipedia? Why do we inhabit their kingdoms so readily, and is this dependency itself a danger?

I am among those who respond to the charismatic rhetoric of King Henry in Shakespeare's play. But when the king turns nasty, as when he threatens the French citizens at Harfleur that his soldiers will soon be raping their daughters and putting their babies heads on pikes -- it's good to remember that sovereign power is never something to take for granted or take lightly.