Showing posts with label congress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label congress. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Please Call Your Representatives (Again)

Well, they're trying to mess up the internet again.

The FCC plans to change the rules that keep the internet neutral, to let your internet provider or ISP:

1) Charge you more for faster service.  (Meaning poorer or thriftier people get crummier service.  

ADDENDUM: Oops! they do this already, when your service slows after you reach your phone's data cap.  I miss-typed.  But what may now happen is a sort of airline-ification of your internet service... Want streaming?  Extra.  Want access to the cloud?  Extra?  Want knees or oxygen with that?  You get the idea.  Oh, did you want You Tube with your internet?)

What's for sure is that ISPs will:

2)  Charge businesses, websites, and streaming services etc. more to reach you.  (Meaning poorer, newer, start-up, and niche guys can't compete with richer, more established, mainstream ones.  That favorite viral video not on Netflix?  That weird genre comic?  That unpopular opinion?  Sloooooow to loooooad.)

3)  "Fast" and "slow" lanes (AKA decent versus crummy service) add up to de facto censorship.  

Not political censorship necessarily, but, for instance, you might have a bad connection when ordering pizza from Dominos... and a strangely good connection to Pizza Hut.  So you'll start ordering more Pizza Hut.  If your internet provider just happens to get kickbacks from them...?  Pure coincidence!

That's the obviously profitable commercial censorship, that profit motives will determine what you can or cannot see online.  But with all these dark money PACs around it's only a matter of time (think seconds) before some ISP is paid to speed up one political party's ads or trash talk.  Heck, if a Koch Brother or a Soros own a big percent of an internet corp. they might even tilt that scale for free.  Your news and then your political and social views will be warped by what Big Internet Brother wants you to see.

Scary.

The internet is the conduit through which most of our lives now travel - do we want a filter to collect more money for our ISPs clogging it up?  

Polluting it?



So.

Call your representatives in Congress.  Explain this stupidity to them!  Because your protest is the only thing possibly stopping this.  You got less than two days.

Tuesday, February 7, 2017

Up is Down, Black is White

Feel like America has fallen Through the Looking Glass?

Me too.


Anyway.  

Whenever you're talking to, emailing, faxing, writing to, or protesting at your senator or representative on the latest Outrage du Jour, please remember to mention NEA funding too.  The National Endowment for the Arts supports all sorts of art - it's especially important in getting arts into the countryside and into smaller towns, where students (or adults) wouldn't otherwise have art funding at all.  

My personal experience of NEA support comes mostly from Kitchen Dog Theater, where for five consecutive years (the only Texas theater who can say this!) we have received national funding for our New Works Festival.  

New plays by living American writers!

If you do feel moved to write your congressional folk, you're welcome to use this postcard:

Please feel free to use - print at 4 1/4" x 6" on card stock

This year will be Kitchen Dog's 19th New Works Festival.  In our time we've produced 26 world premiers of new plays and 125 staged readings of new works.  That's NEW work by living writers.

Please help us - and all those other artists that count on it - by helping the NEA.