The ostensible anti-piracy bills debated by Congress bear the hallmarks of an archaic politics: an atavism encoded in their very names, which combine duplicitous simplicity with the kind of doublespeak that flourished in the late twentieth century. SOPA is the acronym for the Stop Online Piracy Act, denominating a measure which as law would do much more; PIPA, the Protect Intellectual Property Act, cloaks in the language of apple-pie American values an extraordinary deployment of public power at the behest of private interests. A sharp critique of the bills issued on behalf of the White House by President Obama’s senior IP, technology, and cybersecurity advisors would seem to promise that the bills would meet with veto in their present form. But even if the measures were to go down by vote, the broadening clash between the political habits formed in the midst of the Westphalian system and those arising from the life of electronic networks would be far from over.

But I’ve strayed from any semblance of authority wherever I begin to touch on the legislative, constitutional, and commercial aspects of these bills. I’m sensitized instead to the peculiar cultural effects of the controversy that surrounds them—and in that cultural vein, a couple of impressions seem worthy of note.

First, there is the emergence from the midst of the Wikipedian community of a bona-fide political process, dramatized by the Wikipedia page devoted to the resolution that the online encyclopedia should go dark for 24 hours to protest the bills before Congress (expect that last link at some point to break). The page traces a trans-national, disembodied, distributed community’s roughing-out of the summary will of a body politic, a coming into sovereign consciousness—a process that manifests clear affinities with the consensus-driven culture of the Occupy movement (with its own deep and well-watered roots in the history of protest and popular movements).

A second and related cultural effect comes to life in the curious and evocative rhetoric of the response: to “go dark,” to enact an absence, a performance (if hardly an actual and irrevocable instantiation) of the dissolution of the network itself. Here too we catch a glimpse of the Occupy movement reflected in our mirroring screens. The occupations rejuvenated an embodied rhetoric of people in places, a fundamental politics of presence; the impending darkness of Wikipedia (in which the online encyclopedia will be joined by a growing cohort of Internet actors, including the Berkman-born Global Voices project) manifests a complimentary absence.

Occupy rediscovered the politically-compelling qualities of place; in going dark, Wikipedia strives to remind us that while the Internet may exist in virtual space, it has fast become a very real place.