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    Jonah Bossewitch – The ZyprexaKills campaign: Peer production and the frontiers of radical pedagogy

    Jonah Bossewitch tells the story of the participatory campaign against blockbuster antipsychotic drug Zyprexa, suggesting that participatory culture might give to way to participatory democracy, and highlighting how collaborative technologies can play a leading role in radical actions.

    “Change comes from power, and power comes from organization. In order to act, people must get together… Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” – Saul Alinsky


    Like the telegraph and the railroad in their time, the Internet has been heralded as the promoter of equality, freedom, and democracy. And like the technologies that preceded it, its impact will ultimately derive from the ways we choose to use it. In the post dot-com era, the Internet is best known for entertainment, commerce, and socializing although it is also being utilized for more earnest activities such as education, political advocacy, and direct social action.


    Leveraging the writable web is an important way that organizations are improving their operational efficiency. The de-facto suite of Web 2.0 applications – a mailing list, a wiki, a blog, shared public tags, and RSS, are rapidly becoming part of the typical grassroots communications toolkit. Beyond the backoffice, organizers are also learning to embrace the network as their new medium, just as authors learned to embrace the word processor. This emerging wave of technologies is can provide transparency, accountability, and sustainability to loosely connected advocates and activists. But the use of these tools is not just confined to the echo chambers of cyberspace – their impact is crossing over into more established domains of political engagement, such as civil disobedience, strategic litigation, and the traditional media.


    This essay spotlights a recent episode of cyberactivism which employed tactics on the bleeding edge of technology and the frontier of civil liberties. The story suggests how participatory culture might give to way to participatory democracy, and especially how these kinds of technologies can play a leading role in radical actions. It also demonstrates the strong symbiotic relationship between new and traditional media, and presents new models for their future collaboration.


    This is serious… too much of us is dangerous


    The ZyprexaKills campaign was launched in December 2006 after the New York Times published a series of front-page investigative articles exposing a decade long scandal within the pharmaceutical industry. The campaign targeted the blockbuster antipsychotic Zyprexa (Olanzapine), a drug approved to treat schizophrenia and acute mania, manufactured by the multinational pharmaceutical corporation Eli Lilly. Internal documents leaked to the Times revealed that Lilly had knowingly downplayed the lethal side-effects of their best selling drug Zyprexa, and conducted an illegal marketing campaign encouraging primary care physicians to prescribe Zyprexa off-label, beyond its FDA approved purposes.


    The evidence substantiating these allegations was leaked to the Times by a human rights attorney, James Gottstein, who had lawfully subpoenaed them from Dr. David Egilman, an expert witness in ongoing litigation against Lilly. Lilly had produced over 11 million electronic documents during discovery for this trial, which were sealed by the court to expedite the case. In addition to the New York Times, Gottstein distributed the documents he had obtained to the National Public Radio, a congressional oversight committee, and about a dozen health and human rights advocacy organizations. Gottstein testified that “he wanted to get them out in a way that would make it impossible to get them back.”


    Vigilante justice served over http


    Soon after the first wave of New York Times stories hit the stands, electronic copies of the documents surfaced on the Internet, served from a variety of sources over a range of protocols. HTTP, FTP, Tor, Freenet, Bittorrent, Usenet, and complimentary file sharing services were all employed in efforts to rapidly and anonymously distribute these resources.


    An ad-hoc community of passionate activists and citizen-journalists began to (self-)organize around the scandal and rapidly created an open, dedicated mailing list alongside a publicly editable companion wiki at pbwiki.com – a popular gratis wiki service. The community began to critically analyze the issues around Lilly’s illegal conduct and track the worldwide dissemination efforts. Many of the contributors edited the wiki while running the Tor program, effectively anonymizing their participation.


    In anticipation of potential threats to any single website, the ZyprexaKills campaign introduced a shared tag, ‘zyprexakills’, around which all public communications relating to this campaign could organize. This tactic insured that in the ensuing game of wack-a-mole, the compromise of any particular domain would not prevent activists from locating one another – they could simply find each other using any common search engine. Naming the campaign also helped previously unconnected activists find one another in the first place.


    Upon learning about the breach Lilly’s legal team sprang into action with predictable vigor. They persuaded a Federal District Judge to issue an injunction against Gottstein forbidding the dissemination of the memos. The gag order was extended twice in an attempt to control an ever expanding diffusion. The third version of the court’s injunction forbade any speech which “facilitated the dissemination of the documents” and was directed at both individuals and web sites (specified by domain name). One of the domains enjoined was the publicly editable wiki, zyprexa.pbwiki.com.


    Linking is not a crime


    The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) responded to the contributor’s pleas for assistance, and cried foul at the Court’s sweeping prohibitions on speech. At stake was the well established First Amendment doctrine of prior restraint. This principle guarantees every American the right, with very rare exceptions, to say what they please and suffer the consequences afterwards. A court has the limited power to restrain the speech of parties participating in litigation, and trade secrets may also be subject to this type of protection. However, the wiki contributors are several degrees of separation removed from the parties in the case, and it is preposterous for Lilly to claim that illegal marketing practices constitute a trade secret.


    The case represented the EFF’s first wiki case, and the technical characteristics of a wiki made feasible certain legal arguments which would not readily apply to blogs. For example, the venerable Judge Learned Hand once offered a famous opinion that the court “cannot lawfully enjoin the world at large, no matter how broadly it words its decree.” Fred Von Lohmann applied this reasoning to the facts, and argued that to enjoin a publicly editable wiki, was to effectively enjoin the world.


    The actions of the mythical netroots fed numerous news cycles in the traditional media, increasing public awareness of the issue and creating a huge demand for the documents. Lilly was caught in a Chinese finger trap – the more they squirmed, the more attention they received from the press. The Wikipedia community closely tracked the story, since a ruling in this case would likely apply similarly to them. In fact, links to the documents quickly appeared in entries on “Zyprexa” and “Eli Lilly”. The story had been essentially transformed from one about corruption in Big Pharma, to a digital First Amendment story featuring wikis, bittorrent, and Tor.


    In late February 2007, Judge Wienstien issued a lengthy and complex ruling which upheld the injunction against a few named individuals, but concluded that “it is unlikely that the court can now effectively enforce an injunction against the Internet in its various manifestations, and it would constitute a dubious manifestation of public policy were it to attempt to do so.” While the Judge did not accept the broader First Amendment arguments, nor decide to treat the wiki with the full fledged privileges of a news organization, the ZyprexaKills campaign was still a politically significant success.


    At the time of this writing, seven state Attorney General’s offices have opened investigations against Lilly, and, Dr. David Graham, the FDA staffer who played a major role in Vioxx’s withdrawal from the market, has begun to scrutinize Zyprexa. Finally, on March 5, Representative Henry Waxman (D-Calif), the chairman of the house committee on Oversight and Government Reform, subpoenaed the documents directly from Lilly; congressional hearings are likely. It is impossible to demonstrate that these investigations were spurred by the additional media attention that the ZyprexaKills campaign garnered, but it is fair to say that this additional attention did not hurt the cause. In fact, the documents are now legally being analyzed and served by a professional investigative journalist, Philip Dawdy, who authors the increasingly popular blog, furioussearons.com. Furious Seasons now hosts individual documents, each addressable at their own URL, links to searchable plain text versions of the documents, and he reports that the both the US government and Lilly are frequent visitors of his site.


    Lessons taught, lessons learned


    The ZyprexaKills campaign is a powerful case study of an ad-hoc community which spontaneously formed around a particular issue that cut across legal, academic, activist, and journalistic concerns. The participants shared ideologies and histories – many immediately recognized the similarities of this case to the release of the Diebold memos, and the ancillary efforts in the fight to keep them available to the public. These shared cultural references allowed the campaigners to communicate with ease and operate with great agility.


    From a pedagogical perspective, we can view the ZyprexaKills campaign as a lesson on the practice of safely and anonymously blowing a whistle in a world of omniscient surveillance. In contrast to the typical narratives around the tools employed — terrorism, child pornography, and music piracy – this operation clearly demonstrated the pressing public need for these protocols. It bolsters arguments which assert the strong relationships between anonymity to free speech, and stands as a powerful testimony to the importance of maintaining network neutrality.


    The campaign’s choice of communication technologies reflected the dynamics of the participants relationships and demonstrated the vital role that these disruptive technologies can play. Software has gone social, but it’s not just for socializing. There is important and hard work to be accomplished and we need to be using technology intelligently so that we can communicate and act more purposefully and effectively.


    Further links


    The Zyprexa chronicles


    Alchemical musings


    Special issue: recent articles, wiki politics
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