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Friday, February 20, 2004
Ideas of Exchange 
| | Microsoft Exchange, and its deep entrenchment in many enterprises, is the subject of Competencies, which is this week's Suitwatch at Linux Journal. Feel free to add your comments there. I'm trying to start conversations; not just punditize on a subject (one which I'm quick to admit not knowing very well). |
Passivism go boom
| | Yesterday morning I had a nightmare. I won't go into details, except to say nuclear weopons were involved. Being a fairly conscious dreamer, I knew I was dreaming and decided it would be better to wake myself up and think about what the dream meant than to follow the story to its obvious end. |
| | I lay in bed for a long time thinking about what the dream meant. What bothered me about the dream wasn't that a bomb had gone off, but that I had been in a position to stop it and didn't. The problem wasn't the bomb, I realized, or the willingness of somebody to use it; but that I had been passive about it. So had everybody else, I realized. It was like we were all watching a TV show. |
| | Passivism, I realized, is the sickness. And its cure is activism. |
| | The subject of activism has been on my mind lately. A conference call on the subject, originally scheduled for Wednesday, will happen today. Thinking out loud here is one way of preparing for it. |
| | I was an activist of sorts back in the Sixties. There were two big issues then: civil rights and the Vietnam war. Like many other students of that time, I favored the former and opposed the latter. I participated in protests when tanks rolled on the streets of Greensboro. I joined striking picketers at local textile mills. I crashed a Klan rally with friends, to see how much we could screw it up (and succeeded to some degree). |
| | In those days the institutions of industry and government seemed far more vast and solid than they do today. They seemed connected only to themselves and others of their kind. |
| | It's different now. Large institutions today — church, business, goverment, education, law enforcement, the courts (and crime as well) — are not just connected by the Net, but rely on its open, free and increasingly capable infrastructure. Activism can now be very direct and personal. The threshold of engagement, of organization, of raising and spending funds, is so low it has become negligible for all but the very poor. |
| | Its enemy is passivism, which is maintained by manufactured entertainment, consumed on a massive scale by citizens of civilized countries around the world. The result is stupidity on a grand scale. |
| | Over the next ten months here in the U.S., we'll see massive appeals by both political parties to the passivism of tv-addicted masses. We'll also see the whole stupidity-drug distribution system gradually undermined by the activism of connected constituents, of wised-up citizens who would rather do something than nothing. The main questions for those activists will be how, not why. |
| | And the biggest job will be raising the number of who. |
Makes complete sense
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