Outrageous? Gimmicky? Obnoxious? Perhaps. But the cleverly coordinated web protests against SOPA and PIPA are better described as the in-your-face future of “Corporate Social Responsibility” marketing. Call it “Annoy-vation.”

The New York Times was wrong (of course) when it declared the protests “A Political Coming of Age for The Tech Industry.” That’s laughable; the substantive issues underlying the controversial legislations are sideshows. No, the real story here is the willingness so many companies displayed — Wikipedia going dark; Google’s logo blackout — to irk, irritate and/or annoy their users into awareness about a cause that infuriated them. What a novel twist to that famous saying that “people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” These protests unambiguously let hundreds of millions of users all over the world know how much they cared about these potential laws.