I struggle to comprehend the mindset of the people who made the “I Work for the Internet” page.

I, like most of the faces there, work at a tech startup.

Unlike the majority of the faces on that page, I’ve been arguing against the advance of statism for as long as I’ve been shaving.

I don’t understand the occasional politics. The president is a wonderful guy to vote for who will bring you hope and change, apparently, up until the political system creates a bill that actually threatens your ability to do your job.

It’s fine when car manufacturers, energy companies, chemical companies, guitar companies, meat-packers, farmers, and anyone else that you can think of get subjected to draconian regulation that determines everything that they can and can’t do–

But when it comes to your industry, a totally awesome page full of people springs up out of nowhere arguing against the latest egregious law.

The destructive regulations proposed are no less damaging than any of the other millions of laws that control other industries.

I don’t know if the movement to oppose the legislation will succeed or not. But the hypocritical outrage bothers me.

When I complain about one of the various wars the US engages in, I get almost no backing from normal people. I don’t get the sense that the people in these photos gives much thought at all to the millions of people imprisoned in this country at all.

Moral outrage is only meaningful if it comes from something other than narrow self-interest. For it to have a wider impact, it must be universally applied.

It can’t just be ‘murder is bad, except when I’m killing people’ or ‘government oversight and regulation is wonderful, except when it’s my industry.’

I fail to perceive the moral difference between the regulation that outlaws high-water-pressure showerheads and SOPA.

I don’t get the mentality that cheers when the president announces a round of multi-billion dollar subsidies to the tech industry and then boos when the same guy threatens to pass crippling regulation on the same industry.

When he is doing something ‘nice’ for your industry, he’s the ‘good daddy,’ but when he threatens to do something mean, he’s suddenly the ‘bad daddy.’

Greedy amorality seems like a great survival strategy until someone with a bigger gun comes along. Morality is itself a social technology that, properly used, results in a society that increases in prosperity through the ages.

A completely amoral society always devolves into apocalyptic bloodshed.

The tech industry has benefited massively from the purposefully ‘hands-off’ regulatory approach that the government has taken towards the internet since its inception. It means that venture capitalists prefer to fund tech startups with little-to-no regulatory overhead — other industries are hobbled by the need for constant compliance, regular bribes to politicians, and often (as with finance) near-total domination by the state. Capital flows to where it’s least-impeded.

I suppose this kind of behavior is to be expected — it’s in the narrow, amoral self-interest of internet tech workers to be in favor of regulation for everyone else and to be for no regulation when it comes to their own industry. It ensures that the industry retains its relative privilege, which translates into higher salaries for workers and greater chances of success for companies.

It is also ultimately self-destructive, but not necessarily within the lifespans of the people promoting this state of affairs. The same tech muck-a-mucks who are happy to fête whatever bozo president is in charge with fancy suppers at $50k/plate may die long before the consequences of their appeasement ever impacts them personally.

I see these periodic dramas as a sort of bribe-collection moment for politicians. Tech types are notoriously stingy with bribes. It is a way for the political class to signal that, on a whim, they could destroy the industry. No rational argument, apparently, can tame this desire for destruction. Only a sudden mass outbreak ofbegging and money-raising can prevent the Orc-like politicos from Washington from rampaging through the industry, cutting down thriving companies with deadly cease-and-desist letters.

I, for one, don’t think that my freedom is something that I need to lick anyone’s fancy leather shoes for. It’s not someone else’s to give to me in the first place.

I have been on the other end of calls that this site asks people to make to congressional offices.

I would expect these calls to go to the same places that I put them when I received them from angry constituents — the notepad of some stressed-out, low-level government worker. It would then be ‘brought to the attention of’ some politician, which would in all likelihood never happen. Constituents only meet with politicians in staged, Potemkin events like ‘town halls.’

If you want to have dinner with a politico — a real conversation — you need to pay for it.

Considering the financial shambles that the American government is actually in, I’m more inclined to reply to these sorts of proposed laws with a…

“Do you feel lucky, punk?”

…because the hysteria is just what the political class wants. They want the rending of garments and maybe the formation of some insufferable PAC that will run advertisements targeted towards geriatric voters that have nothing in common with me.

The best answer to this legislation is, in my opinion, to taunt ‘em to pull the trigger.

Nothing good ever came of appeasing bullies.