“The truth,” writes Dave Winer, is that “you have to help other people if you want to survive.”
“We are incredibly codependent. Our fates are determined by what all of us do.”
“Somehow,” he continues, we Americans “got pretty far without having to face this. The myth is we all live on the prairie fighting for survival and not able to depend on anyone else. Yet in reality we can’t survive without lots of people coming through for us.”
In other words, our national mythology is getting in the way of dealing with a good number of things that threaten to smack us in the face any time now.
Just to make a quick example, Dave Winer mentioned this in passing in his linkblog recently:
"Pretty soon we're going to wish we had a simple way to set up ad hoc networks of people that are not subject to being turned off by people who eat dinner with the president." (9/12/25)
That comment shows that Reading the news at 4am (paraphrased above) has its feet planted in the tech world, but the implications of that blog post are much wider: the national psyche, our myths, illusions and delusions, the distressing practicalities of our current political moment.
I'll toss in an example or two of my own. Op-eds in leading periodicals almost never discuss the tools and skills activists need right now and for years to come for any of the issues discussed on any op-ed page. Most Americans can't explain the necessary toolkit of activism at all, if they notice that something beyond voting is required. Masters of Distraction are happy to fill the media with chaos in endless supply so as to keep things that way. Most people don't know that successful political movements require partnerships and new of-the-moment as well as long-term affiliation with other groups. Few people can say in so many words that activism that has a chance for success requires affiliation and, as Dave Winer says in the 4 am blog post, if that's not urgency enough, well, so does survival.