Category: Passages

In Death of a Salesman, as a working person’s life is falling to pieces, the one closest to him says, “Attention must be paid!” A 1999 review of the play’s revival interprets the line this way: “When people hurt as Willie does, it is inhuman to look away.” And for the duration of the live performance, the audience accepts that responsibility, I guess.

At the end of Brassed Off, a movie about a coal mining community’s struggles, at last the town’s band wins a music competition, and the band leader speaks to the audience about the impossibility of getting the wider world to pay attention to the ongoing destruction of their community. He devises a brief gesture that will might allow them momentarily to be heard, or not. After all, he points out, other concerns already fill the airwaves, the hearts and minds of the country. No way, it seems, to compete with all that noise.

Attention must be paid, but it may not be.

And drive across town or across the state, you see places where plainly there is great need and peril. Surely attention must be paid, but it may not be.

The information economy, the attention economy, the entertainment economy, the propaganda machinery, drowns out, distracts, and overwhelms. Structurally, proper, ethical, humane, civic-minded attention is out of reach. We're out of practice and it's out of reach.

Praise for a user document created by the Gemini large language tool reminds me that I haven’t run my private test on ChatGPT or its buddies lately. My test involves asking questions of some complexity about things that I am very knowledgeable about, evaluating the answer, and also seeing what it takes to get a more refined answer from the tool.

The clear, helpful user doc reminds me of my conclusion from earlier runnings of my private test, which was that the AI tool was skillful in creating brief texts organized as bullet lists or numbered steps. 

Certain kinds of information are well-served in those formats. Other topics can’t burst out of the numbing simplicity of a clearly organized five-paragraph high school theme unless they have a different structure.

I should ask ChatGPT to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the 5-paragraph theme structure and see what happens.

PS. If you have any questions about what’s mind-numbing about 5-p themes, locate a hundred of them and read them in a row. Or maybe ask ChatGPT to write you a hundred and read those, I don’t know.

I was in a building talking by cell phone, but my reception was poor. The fellow on the other end of the call said, “Walk toward a window.” Go to where cell phone waves move freely through the air.

The same goes for free speech. On the web, Dave Winer urges us to do the equivalent of walking toward a window. Walk out of the silo, go to where free speech moves freely through the air. He writes:

One of the things we can do to preserve freedom is to resume using the open internet to communicate instead of the silos of Zuck and Musk et al. When you use the web instead of a silo you are helping build community outside, where free speech is the default. The more of us who communicate outside, the more people will be attracted. Your participation helps draw people out, where independent developers can create new tools for you without waiting for permission of big companies who own the network you're using. It's like voting. The more people do it, the stronger we all are.

The principle here is far-reaching, not just for the web —

1. Behave as though a narrow space designed by others for their purposes, not yours, is good enough for you, and you signal that to the wider group: “This narrow space is good enough for you, too!”
2. Behave as though you should be free, that you are free to move freely, speak freely in a space that suits you, and you signal to the wider group that they deserve the same opportunities. “We deserve an open space for creativity, freedom, and partnership, and we shall have it. Maybe we already do.”

When we see a group of people living in creativity, freedom, and partnership over there, we tend to say, “Let’s go over and see if we can join in.” We say, “We’ll have what they’re having!”

When, asserting our principles, we put down a marker asserting our own individual freedom, that marker and those principles create a little better chance for the other person’s freedom too.

Vaclav Havel wrote about living in truth. Think carefully about what you really value, and live as free as you can in the powerful truth of it. Doing so will inspire your friends and neighbors toward their own freedom and it will drive the power-hungry in their towers a little bit crazy. This was part of what he called the power of the powerless.

 “Let the web be the web,” writes Dave Winer. Its real, specific, far-reaching virtues [imagined in substantial part from the very start by Tim Berners-Lee] —  know them, name them, let them continue to unfold for us. Yes, yes, yes.

But actually, Dave Winer said, “We let the web be the web.” Understanding the web, naming its virtues and its promise, is work we have to do together. No Silicon Silomaster or Guru Gazillionaire can be trusted with the task. People ordinarily seem powerless, but people together are the only ones for this important work.

When a project needs to be solved in the realm of shared, evolving, open practices rather than being abandoned to heavy-handed, pattern-dictating operations of someone else’s capital, people together are the ones for the task. When Vaclav Havel wrote about the power of the powerless, he wasn’t kidding.

With good tools and a taste for creativity and freedom, it’s people who put the we in web.

Americans who are not apolitical still tend to think about politics in terms of the current crisis and the upcoming election. On the average, we don't have a ready grasp, I believe, on a realistic timeline for our political challenges. The toolkit of activism that has a chance for success requires voting, but much more.

It's not hard to see that political action that might change the quality of life is the work of generations. 

See, for example, the United States section in the eight hour day/forty hour work week article on Wikipedia. Here we see that early episodes in the struggle took place in the 1790s and 1830s, continued steadily for decades, and even after the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act the struggle has continued. For example, some employers have sought to avoid labor law standards by renaming employees as independent contractors, thereby seeming to grant themselves exemptions to aspects of established labor protection. After more than two centuries, the work goes on.

Powerful people know that any faddish activism will soon blow away in the breeze. No need for the powerful to pay much attention to activism that doesn't look ready for the very long haul. For the work of a generation, for starters.

Resist much, obey little, wrote Walt Whitman in "To the States," a three-line poem he placed near the start of his life-long collection of poems, Leaves of Grass. Why? Because, Whitman said, once liberty has been stolen or crushed, no nation ever wins it back. True? I don't know, but it must be true that the recovery, if possible, will be lengthy and hard-won.

To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little,

Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,

Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.

I suppose there are people who on their deathbed find themselves thinking, "I wish I had asked fewer questions, I wish I had resisted less and obeyed more." Who are these people, though?

There are values and there are values. 

In a coffee shop, if someone mentioned a value I agreed with, I would nod to them across the table, showing my approval.

In a voting booth, if I saw a referendum on something I value, I would vote in favor.

On a busy day, when a referendum was being held, in spite of the inconvenience I would make time to go to the polls and vote in favor of something I value.

I would speak up in a social setting about something I valued.

I would take some time to learn more about something I valued, so I could speak about it in more detail at a community meeting.

I would learn how to speak or write more effectively on behalf of something I valued.

I would spend time to seek allies and build partnerships for activism on behalf of something I valued.

I would learn what attitudes, skills, tools, and affiliations give activism a better chance to succeed, and put these things into practice.

Etc.

This list was provoked by a sentence written by Vaclav Havel: “We came to understand (or, to be precise, some of us did) that the only genuine values are those for which one is capable, if necessary, of sacrificing something.”*

Values for which we might nod in affirmation across the table of a coffee shop are one kind of value.

*Source: Page 137, “The Co-responsibility of the West,” in The Art of the Impossible: Politics and Morality in Practice by Vaclav Havel. Original article in Foreign Affairs, 12/22/93.

“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.

In the founding documents Tim Berners-Lee knew he was launching a kind of space, enabled by particular hardware and software, where people were free to read and write as they wished, to collaborate, to build audiences, and to assert relationships via links.

Though money was required to build this kind of space, and to read and write there a person needed money for access and tools, Berners-Lee was not creating a commercial space. As designed, the space with its creative freedoms was so obviously worth funding that no direct return on investment was required.

Some experiments are just worth paying for, no questions asked.

But people realized that the hardware and software could be used to create commercial spaces of one kind or another. Craig’s List is an early example. These commercial spaces could, practically speaking, close off nearly all of the freedom Berners-Lee envisioned.

On Craig’s List you could read ads all day long, and you could place an ad yourself, but you couldn’t write a novel there. You couldn't organize a union or publish the results of your investigation into local politics. You could write an ad of a certain type, placing the right kinds of text in little boxes set up and organized for you by Craig’s team.

Institutions like Craig’s List have come close to destroying newspapers in the United States and elsewhere. They were free to do so — that’s capitalism for you — even though newspapers have an essential civic purpose in a free society.

Even though people appreciate a foundational civic institution in a general, fuzzy-headed way, we don’t really take much notice when one is being crushed by a fresh wave of innovation. Or captured. Or turned into a hollow shell of its former self.

A web page of one kind or another must have a web address but it may or may not be part of the space Berners-Lee envisioned. It may or may not be part of a space of individual and group freedom to test and assert meaning.

Staying true to TB-L’s vision, extending and refining it, naming it precisely, and protecting it, is of immense importance in this perilous time.

PS. In the 1989 founding document, Berners-Lee spoke of "Human-readable information linked together in an unconstrained way." So it's always been about freedom to make connections. In the next paragraph he says it doesn't have to be limited to texts.

In Eastern Europe under the thumb of the Soviet Union, people couldn't publish newspapers or magazines without government approval, which was not forthcoming for anything critical of the ruling regime. People interested in protesting against the regime faced prison time, loss of jobs, assignment to street sweeping and building cleaning crews, among other things. Their children might very well be denied access to educational opportunities. The dramatist Vaclav Havel, for example, when not in prison, was for a time forced to work in a brewery rolling barrels to the room where they would be filled with beer.

Much was done to silence the people living behind the Iron Curtain. Brave and resourceful writers could sometimes smuggle their writing out of the Soviet sphere and into the hands of the BBC, Radio Free Europe, or a major western newspaper. People could speak up and be heard in that roundabout way, but they'd likely be punished for doing so.

At times people were able to borrow keys to an office building and use a duplicating machine. During the Velvet Revolution, some news was distributed outside the capital city via cassette tapes. And famously, people especially hungry to write and publish, to read and think alongside others in their country, resorted to publishing in what was called samizdat. 

There were typewriters, there was access to carbon paper, which might produce as many as six copies of a typed document that could be smuggled out into society. If a document was meaningful, a reader might type up six new copies for distribution. It was possible for a new piece of writing to go viral that way, if multiples of six copies could be called viral.

People used the pathways they could find and the publishing tools they could put their hands on.

Question: If conditions grow worse in the United States, what pathways for publishing might remain open? What tools might still be available?

In a nation of 340 million people, what good are six copies–or even six hundred copies–of anything?