DV EXPOSÉ: Why Online Petitions Don't Work

The appeal of online petitions is immediately evident: it's fast, it's anonymous, and it's very easy to do. This is exactly why the sort of people you want to convince won't give two shits about it.

Everything is easy to do on the Internet. Thanks to the cable modem, we can promise anything to anyone without actually meaning it; we're simply too far removed from whatever we're talking about, and we know that our actions have so little consequence, that showing political activism on the Internet is pretty much like telling a month-old baby that you'll love it forever and do anything you can to make it happy. It took zero effort to make that commitment, and it can never come back to haunt you because you're on the Internet and babies are retarded; whether you actually meant what you said is irrelevant, because you sacrificed nothing to say it. 

Nothing made popular on the Internet will ever have any effect on real life

Ron Paul. Snakes on a Plane. McFly sneakers. What do all these things have in common? They all pulled most of their grassroots support from the Internet, and none of them worked out. Ron Paul got his ass handed to him, SOAP wasn't funny enough, and Nike won't take the money or time necessary to switch their Indonesian child slaves frommanufacturing regular kicks to Back to the Future-themed ones.

The real world -- and this may soon change, but it's definitely the case today -- does not give a fuck about the Internet. Sure, the Writers' Guild will fight over money coming from it, but the general American public still has more or less the same opinion of it that the producers do; the Internet doesn't matter and is just a fun little place of no consequence, mainly populated by creepy nerds and loners. Whether or not this is true, I cannot think of a single time where Internet buzz has translated into real life consequences.

And don't talk to me Firefly or Family Guy or Futurama or any other brilliant-but-canceled Fox show starting with the letter F: those series were resurrected in their various forms thanks to DVD sales. At no point was a Comedy Central executive teetering on the fence about whether or not to let Matt Groening finish Futurama, only to be finally convinced by a fucking online petition. DVD sales, not meaningless digital signatures, showed the execs that people loved the show.

The Internet is full of crazy fucking people

While this may seem like a very, very obvious statement, consider what it means for your petition: since the sorts of people you're sending the petition to (people in authority) are probably pretty old, they most likely view the Internet as one great big clusterfuck of insanity, perversion, and stupidity.

"The Internet?", they'll ask. "Isn't that the place with all the animal porn?"

Unfortunately, they are right. The Internet is that place with all the animal porn -- well, the animal porn and your stupid petition, anyway. The people in power will mentally lump your legitimate desire for social change in with the more depressing and weird elements in cyberspace. To a 64-year-old senator with cataracts, there's really no way to differentiate your ideas from that odd-looking fella who sings that "Chocolatey Rain" song.

Most petitions suck anyway

In 2002, a few concerned citizens started the Two Towers Protest Site. The main page of the site consisted of a large petition which requested -- no, demanded -- that Peter Jackson, director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, change the title of the second film (The Two Towers) to something "less offensive" considering the tragedy of September 11th, 2001.

Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't show respect to those who lost their lives at the World Trade Center. And I'm not saying that these protesters and petition-signers didn't have their hearts in the right place, so to speak. I will say, however, that these people were fucking stupid. And yet, their behavior is indicative of the sort of tone behind most petitions: it's either something big and impossible, like "Leave Iraq," or something completely irrelevant and stupid like "Change the name of the 2nd LOTR movie" dreamt up by sexually repressed people who get offended far too easily and frequently. 

If you must start your own online petition, take special care and make sure yours doesn't fall into either of those two categories. 

A petition with a bunch of signatures on a site made specifically for hosting petitions is not impressive

I put an article on Digg, and all the Diggers supported it with a bunch of Diggs, and it got to the Digg Top Ten List! Isn't that impressive?

No.  No, it isn't, because that's what Digg is made for. If the entire site exists to draw attention to good articles, and something I submit gets attention, then I have merely achieved relative popularity within the boundaries of the Digg system. Dozens of articles get Dugg everyday, so my "Real Men Love Howard the Duck" article getting to the front page, while personally pleasing to me, is in no way remarkable to the people who matter.

Similarly, sites like PetitionOnline are utterly ineffectual in initiating change; if a site which is made for the creation and distribution of petitions highlights a few petitions, then it is simply doing its job. If you were to send your congressman a link to a PetitionOnline petition, his first thought would probably be, "How the hell did this asshole get my email address?"; his second would be, "So, wait, a bunch of jackasses who frequent this site just up and decided to sign this petition? Fuck them."

He would then delete your email and have sex with his secretary.

Petitions don't work in general

Outside of  feel-good 80's movies about saving a roller rink/children's home/fraternity, when was the last time you ever heard of a petition actually working, virtual or not? Sure, many of us sign petitions when they're brought up to us by cute, socially-conscious girls with low self-esteem, but do you think those little lists of signatures ever get anything done?

Walk onto any college campus in the United States and wait no less than five minutes, no more than fifteen. Assuming you stay mobile you will be approached by at least three to seven people who have a petition for you to sign. Want to cut down on greenhouse gases? Of course you do. Think the electoral college system should be retired? Hell yes. Should people stop clubbing baby seals and raping underaged women and stabbing people in Darfur? Yes, yes, and yes.

But wanting something doesn't make it so, and signing your name to a sheet of paper along with a few hundred other people won't convince corrupt, frightened politicians to change their corrupt, frightened ways anytime soon. The idea of a petition, of any sort, is predicated on the false belief that people in authority care what their underlings want. Whether we're talking about big corporations or the government, it doesn't matter -- they don't give two shits about you, and will not follow the whims of the majority unless it benefits them or they have no choice. A petition presents the powers that be with neither of these scenarios, and so they are roundly ignored.

Hell, voting doesn't even make a difference these days; what the hell makes people think a petition would?