Where were you during the 2012 blackout?

I’m ecstatic at the uprising of people power we saw on SOPA blackout day, and so damn proud that Greenpeace was a part of it.

Because internet freedom isn’t something we campaign on, but which we campaign *with,* I thought I might have a tough sell internally when I saw the blackout day announced on Reddit and decided we needed to be part of it. Things that fall outside of our campaign programme tend to have difficulty figuring out who can say yes to them.

But it went smooth as butter. I didn’t encounter a single person who didn’t understand the action in one, even when I had to explain what SOPA was, and who didn’t think that of course Greenpeace should be part of it.

I grabbed Zach Johnson’s excellent template from Reddit, we tweaked it just a bit, and sent it out to all Greenpeace offices inviting them to join in. 25 Greenpeace websites went dark on January 18th and were part of the largest internet protest in history.

Now, if only we could command that kind of focus and effort to stopping climate chnage. Hmm, maybe that’s a T-shirt: Save the Earth: It’s the only planet with WIFI.

RT @brianfit #SOPA is dead!!!!! Well done Buffies!!!! Best keep that wooden stake handy, though hmmm?
@PatrikEriksson
Patrik Eriksson

Clay Shirky explains why #SOPA won’t achieve its goals but will produce “pernicious side effects“
http://t.co/NleeU6qT”
@missy__m
Adele

█████ ██ █ ████ everything ███ █████ is ████ ██ ████ fine ████ ███ █ █████ love █████ █████ ███ your ████ ████ government #SOPA
@jsonka
Joe Sonka

with wikipedia down all day due to #sopastrike, i realize I DON’T KNOW ANYTHING! Now I know how congress feels. #sopa
@baratunde
Baratunde

“The problem for the content industry is they just don’t know how to mobilize people” http://t.co/U7Cqt4jh
@brianfit
Brian Fitzgerald

She’s an 8 year old string bender. #SOPA would mean this video would never see daylight. http://t.co/vXAt9FZs
@brianfit
Brian Fitzgerald

Washington Post covering the blackout. Protest is working! http://t.co/jHGbTBWG (thanks @brianfit)
@zacharyjohnson
Zachary John⚡on

And the bartender says, that’s not a duck, that’s my intellectual property and I’m shutting down your website… #SOPAJokes anyone?
@brianfit
Brian Fitzgerald

Thanks, Washington Post, for putting Greenpeace’s SOPA page in top 5! But see my comment! http://t.co/YOcnsrmx We “stole” it — openly.
@brianfit
Brian Fitzgerald

Big thanks to the Zachstronaut @zacharyjohnson for the great #SOPABlackout page we’re using at #Greenpeace today.
@brianfit
Brian Fitzgerald

Greenpeace’s site will be going dark in 3 hours. Find out why: http://t.co/NQi2b2B8 #BlackoutSOPA #DT @Greenpeace
@brianfit
Brian Fitzgerald


SOPA: Corporate censorship threat to online activism

If you don’t know what SOPA is, you should look it up. While touted as a piece of US legislation designed to curtail piracy, it has the potential to allow corporations to censor online activism as well. In a nutshell, SOPA will enable corporations to effectively shut down websites that they believe are infringing their copyrights


Unfriend Coal campaign win! People power about-Faces Facebook

At Greenpeace headquarters in Amsterdam, we are sooooo crap at celebrating. 20 months of sustained campaigning pays off in a big victory against coal use, and we mark it with one quick glass of champagne on a Thursday evening and within minutes everyone was back at their desk. It’s time to crowd source this celebration. So,


Oscar Whiskey Sierra = #OWS = Occupy Wall Street

Rainbow Warrior flies marine signal flags spelling OWS in solidarity with peaceful protestors evicted from the Occupy Wall Street camp in New York. We’re not sure, but this may be the first ever twitter tag raised on signal flags at sea.  You can see them on our webcam here: http://act.gp/rw-camTo all of you in New


Cyberpunk peace ship for a planet that’s a gunboat on a sea of fear

OK, so I see a tweet from Bruce Sterling, the chairman of cyberpunk, that mentions he’s in Amsterdam speaking at the Next Nature conference. So I tweet an invitation to come visit the new Rainbow Warrior, telling him I can get him the captain’s tour. Next thing I know, he’s there on the gangplank. Of


Rainbow Warrior Storified

I’ve been playing around with Storify, and I really like it. Great way not only to tell a story, but to aggregate links, tweets, vids, pix, and all the flotsam and jetsam of fragmentary world of social media in one place. This is an aggregation of blogs, videos, and pix from the Maiden Voyage of


Damn troublemakers…

Woot! The Rainbow Warrior is just leaving the shelter of the Elbe and hitting the North Sea in a Force 7 gale. We’re due to trial the sails today under weather, and our friend Neptune has decided to give us a real test. Should be fun. Meanwhile, I’m in trouble again. A few years back, when


Do you know who that is? Old hands and new

We’re at port in Hamburg now, after a ride down the Elbe and across the Helgoland Bight that I’ll never forget. Late at night in the campaign office behind the wheelhouse, headphones on, a fine playlist providing the soundtrack as I worked and felt the sea start to rise. By early evening, the Rainbow Warrior


The Rainbow Warrior: a hold packed full of stories and a compass set by dreams

Last night I slept aboard the Rainbow Warrior. I’m up early, 4 am, to ponder the almost impossible job of explaining the magic of this ship to the folks whose donations made it possible, of bringing them on a journey with Pablo, Helene, Harmony, and the other New Hands on Deck as they discover their way


For Chris Robinson

The dacron of this sail passed over my hands as we raised the jib on the new Rainbow Warrior today, and I had the overwhelming feeling I was touching the soul of a living ship. And I thought about Chris Robinson, fearless seafaring activist captain who outmaneuvered nuclear submarines and crossed the oceans in a


Blog Action Day: Food? Beware its weaponization

For World Food Day and Blog Action Day, allow me to share one of the concerns that keeps me up at night. Imagine you wanted to take over the world. What might you do? Well, you could do worse than, say, control the world’s food supply, right? But how might you go about that. Let’s


These are the voyages of the Starship.… Rainbow Warrior

If you’re a Star Trek fan, you’ll remember those film episodes where Kirk and Spock and McCoy get a look at the new version of the Enterprise — it was like space ship porn: slow, majestic music, an effect like vaseline on the lens, long slow panning shots in which the camera almost licked the


Rainbow Warrior III: New hands on deck

Have you been on the boats?” That’s generally the first question anyone gets asked when they say they work for Greenpeace. My usual response is “not as much as I’d like.” Next week, I’ll not only be aboard a boat, but taking part in the maiden voyage of the Rainbow Warrior III. This will be the third


Greenpeace USSR: Retronaut story

It’s Greenpeace’s 40th anniversary year, and I’m resolved to try and capture more of the stories that we tell around our organisational campfires. Anne Dingwall just dropped by my desk, and I mentioned I’d seen this video of the insane queue in Moscow when McDonald’s opened their first store there in 1990. Anne and I


May the Force be All In with the Barbie Facebook Unfriend coal Lego Brand Jam!

Veteran Greenpeace watchers will have noticed that we’re running hot with quite a few online brand-jamming campaigns at the moment. You can become a Jedi in the Rebel Alliance against VW’s green veneer (Yes, VW makes some of the most fuel efficient cars on the European market. But thats only 6% of their global group


Parables of persuasion: you were headquartered WHERE?

So I’m in the pub last night, as one tends to be of an evening in the UK, and mention that I once lived in Lewes, down near Brighton, for 3 years. I’m among a gaggle of Greenpeacers meeting here in Richmond, across the street from a house where Ron Wood once lived and in


We just set a world record!

There was some whoopin’ and hollerin’ round here today, as our goal to set a world record for number of comments in a Facebook thread was shattered. The Guinness Book of World Records pegged our goal at 50,000 comments in 24 hours. We did it in 10 hours and 50 minutes flat. The clock is


SXSW round up notes & tweets

While reactors were melting down in Japan and protestors were being shot in the street in Libya, I was complaining about sore feet as I walked around in the crystal bubble which is SXSW (More fully South by Southwest, but pronounced “South-by” whenever said aloud). This is what SXSW Interactive founder and resident Grumpy Old


The rant of reason: Bruce Sterling defects from Boomers

I look forward to Bruce Sterling’s traditional closing speech at SXSW more than anything at the conference itself. It’s the only place where the heady rush toward the future is momentarily put in check, and somebody has the balls to stand up and ask us if we’ve considered where we’re heading, if we’ve had a


Has Facebook Jumped the Shark?

I love seeing a room break out in an argument, and there was a great one at yesterday’s “Has Facebook Jumped the Shark” session here at SXSW. The basic question was a marketing one prompted by a controversial Ad Age article that Judy Shapiro of engageSimply wrote: IS it really the greatest gift to advertising


Games for good

Both of my favorite sessions so far at SXSW have focussed on games: Seth P of SCVNGR’s keynote and Jane McGonigal’s session entitled “Reality is Broken.” McGonigal believes that games make us smarter, that they improve our lives, that they make us better people. And she rolls out a very impressive set of stats to


Hey Nuclear industry, FUCK YOU

Wake up to news that the Fukushima Dai-Ichi reactor has suffered an explosion following Japan’s earthquake and Tsunami. Officials don’t know if there’s been a melt down, a plume of smoke that may be radioactive is spewing skyward, the evacuation zone is being expanded beyond 12 kilometers, and every nightmare scenario the environmental movement has


Inventing a low-carbon future at SXSW

I’m stuck. I don’t know whether to go watch robot dogs play soccer, attend a lecture on how online games change your brain chemistry, share stories of famous Social Media #Fails like Nestle’s response to Greenpeace’s Kit-Kat campaign, or catch a workshop in iPad app design. I’m at South by Southwest (SXSW), the Geek Glastonbury,


5 lessons from the Middle East for the climate movement?

As I write this, the Middle East is in turmoil as repressive regimes are challenged by the forces of democracy. It’s messy: not all the forces at work are ethically or democracy minded, not all the successors to tyranny are necessarily going to be better for the people of the Middle East or the future


Coming soon to an iPad near you: Greenpeace Images

We’ll be putting out our first iPad app soon from Greenpeace International — a drop-dead gorgeous image slideshow featuring some of the great (even award-winning) photography that has been captured by our snappers. I’m really excited to see this go out: it’s a very simple concept, developed very quickly, but it takes advantage of the


Greenpeace ranked #1 on Facebook!

Well this just made me button-popping proud of our little team in Amsterdam: we’ve hit #1 among all non-profits on Facebook, according to Innova & Bella, a Marketing Research firm which rated non-profits according to performance in three categories: the quality and number of interactive asks, the number of “likes” enjoyed by each group, and


Skepticgate: oh, sorry Congress, did I forget to mention I’m funded by big oil?

A scientist who is paid to have an opinion is not a scientist. He’s a lobbyist. And Congress isn’t supposed to call lobbyists in as expert witnesses to give scientific opinions. Patrick Michaels probably knew that when he told Congress he got less than 3% of his funding from oil. So he got to testify.


1992: A memo to Greenpeace from David McTaggart

I was reminded by a friend of this email, written by David McTaggart in 1992 and sent widely throughout Greenpeace at the time. The internal squabble it was intended to address is long a thing of the past, but the summation he gives of the organisation’s early strategy and development and founding principles has some


Farewell the Sirius: second star to the right, and straight on til morning.

They gathered to farewell a ship — former captains, campaigners, and crew — and raise a toast to a creature of steel and wood and rope which had been their home, their guardian, their fierce champion, and occasionally their trickster nemesis. And, as whenever a Greenpeace salty dog or two is gathered, they rose, one


Random captures from 10:10:10

People at 7347 events in 188 countries are getting to work on the climate crisis, check out the amazing pics from all over the world here here and here and here.Here’s a taste: Direct Communication in New Zealand. Penguins get to work too! Fixing Bikes Guerrilla Gardening in South Africa Sandra Antonovic is overseeing the planting of 101,010 trees in


Let’s get to work! 10:10:10!

–Check out TckTckTcks’s cool Flipiture of stuff already happening –Send your photos and up to 90 seconds of video of what YOU’re doing to stop Climate change today: globalworkparty@tcktcktck.org (Subject is your title, body is your description, attachment is your media. http://www.anylink.com/ in the body hyperlinks from the flip side of the photo.) –Help document the day by


Bloggers’ Brief: Energy [R]evolution

Just finished watching Sven Teske and Kert Davies speaking about the Energy [R]evolution in New York and out over the interwebs. Great, inspiring stuff, and all the better for both of them having untold or UNDERtold stories that the world really needs to hear. In Kert’s case, he’s been digging for years into just how


Ryanair and climate change.

So the chief of Ryanair doesn’t believe in global warming, says this article in the Telegraph today, and Joss Garman delivers one of the best put-downs ever: “Personally, I wouldn’t trust ‘O’Really’ to tell me the price of a seat on his own airline, but to be fair his position does have the support of such


Friends facing jail: verdict Monday

On Monday, two of the most committed activists I have ever known in Greenpeace get a verdict in their two-year-long trial in Japan. They are charged with stealing a box of embezzled whale meat, which they turned over to police as evidence of corruption in the Japanese whaling industry. But what’s really on trial at


Paul the octopus predicts the energy future

Tiny little brain. Still gets it right.