Category: Passages

The average political speech, the average op-ed, the average social media post, seeks a nod of agreement and maybe a trip to the voting booth. These average speeches and bits of writing don't care about building organized activism. The foundation of their philosophy is that "we insiders, having been elected, will take care of everything. We don't need citizens except for a day in November. It's a pretty story those speakers and writers tell themselves about their own importance, but in a crisis like the one we have now, the writers of these speeches and op-eds are out of their minds. In this kind of crisis, average political speech will kill us.

This post is a cousin to the earlier post about semaphore, I think.

I was thinking about semaphore, the ancient system of very fast communication. You put a team on the top of every ridge between the country's border and the capital. You equip them with a messaging code and a means for sending messages to the next ridge — flags, smoke, flashing lights. 

This kind of system still works. A few years ago my students and I sent a message around the perimeter of a very large university building in 4.5 seconds.

System requirements

At the edge of the country, or in any other danger zone, you need a team watching for hints of enemy action. They have a job that they focus on.

The message teams on the ridge-tops have a job they focus on.

In the capital city, another team must be prepared to interpret the signals and to act on them.

Without these teams with focused tasks, we might as well plant flowers at the top of each ridge and go up there with a nice bottle of wine and sit in the pretty sunshine. Or we can sit at the end of the message stream saying "Oh wow, this is depressing" over and over again.

Semaphore is not broadcasting.

Most message systems we enjoy each day are, down deep, systems of broadcasting, even for those of us with few followers on social media. NBC and FOX broadcast to their millions, and people like me broadcast to my tens. Both are forms of broadcasting, in that seed is tossed out to whatever audience is there, and for NBC and FOX and most social media users like me, we behave as though that's fine, that's good enough. A spray of messages going out is good enough for most who operate on a loosely defined broadcasting model. 

If our media tools were more like semaphore, and less like broadcasting, things might be different. Those who report on whatever issue, from whatever frontier, would not be satisfied with what I'm calling broadcasting. We'd organize at the send end, and we'd want a team at the other end that is organized around appropriate action.

The tools we have for the most part don't support organization at either end of the semaphore chain. Yes, messages go out from ridge to ridge, but there's usually no team on the frontier knowingly attempting a worthy shared task. And there's usually no team at the far end of the message chain focused on making use of the reports.

We have fabulous messaging systems undreamed of a few decades ago. We have for the most part not built the social and civic groups at each end of the message line to test the power of the tools.

It's a bit like a US Civil War army placing cavalry way out front to locate and judge the strength of the enemy, then send a message back. And even if you did have cavalry sending good messages, it's a bit like there's nobody back at the army's headquarters organized to plan a response.

That seems to be the plan, anyway. In the spirit of that heartless joke Ronald Reagan used to tell, about how he hated the frightening thought of a person coming from the government to help. In the old video clips, he took such pleasure trotting out those ugly words.

After my brother died in a workplace accident, a person from OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, asked to speak with my parents about what had happened. In the course of their meeting at the house, the OSHA man said, "Each of our regulations was written in someone's blood."

Building over decades a web of protections for workers was the job of OSHA. The glib Reagan joke, the selfish and deceptive destruction of the worthiest work of this kind of government agency — things like this come too easily to some of our fellow Americans. 

Tearing things down takes little time at all. Building something worthy often takes a lifetime, and sometimes saves many a life.

I remember how the news came that day. My niece jotted me a note today reminding me that she barely knew her father.

There comes a time when every activist movement can no longer sustain itself on the energy it has accumulated so far.

• It can't get its voice out far enough to do the necessary work.
• It can't sustain its voice long enough without exhaustion.
• It can't maintain its morale and confidence in the isolation of its small original membership.
• It can't take on larger institutions and more powerful political and economic forces on its own.
• It can't gather the information needed, build the skills required, fast enough. It can't find some of the tools it needs within the circle of its founding membership.

The activist group realizes it needs more partners if there is to be a chance for its work to continue, a chance to succeed.

If the group has been helping out other kindred groups all along, then allies are probably available. If the group has failed to support others along the way, or if the group has insisted on some sort of purity test before making alliances, it's probably too late, and more powerful forces in society will overwhelm and silence the activist group.

When my students and I used to look at historical episodes of activism, we saw this pattern, and so on behalf of the students who teased out the details in class discussions over the years, I pass along this note.

"The Power of the Powerless" is a 1978 essay Vaclav Havel wrote to help advance the thinking and the courage of individuals and groups trying to live positive, honest lives, faithful to truth as they understood it, self-asserting rather than docile, and trying hard not to cower under the Soviet regime behind the Iron Curtain. This essay has much value in any society where power has been accumulated in places distant from the influence of the citizens, where power is used shamelessly and recklessly by those who have consolidated it, and where the institutions of free civic society have been captured or hollowed out, leaving them unable to serve their vital purposes.

The essay is long and addresses several aspects of political and daily life in such circumstances. Here I will say a few words about the first short section, and I'll paste a version of it in below.

In those early paragraphs, Havel notes that outsiders call people like him dissidents, and says the things dissidents do in that society is dissent. Havel is keen to resist the simplification of these terms. He doesn't care for outsiders to do the naming. People inside the society, living in truth in the crisis, should say who they are and what they are about, Havel asserts there. Don't let outsiders tell you what you should be called. Of course in our political climate aggressive and dismissive naming takes place so often that it's hard to take note of it and push each time it happens. Nevertheless, Havel claims the right of naming for the people living the life. Naming is doubly important because people who love making propaganda are often masters of imposing cunningly misleading names on others.

In addition, Havel begins to talk in specific ways about the circumstances of his country at that time — doing so is necessary for thinking clearly in the pages ahead. And likely most important of all, he begins to ask about the real power of these powerless citizens.

Here is the language of section 1 of "The Power of the Powerless" as translated by Paul Wilson:

A specter is haunting Eastern Europe: the specter of what in the West is called "dissent." This specter has not appeared out of thin air. It is a natural and inevitable consequence of the present historical phase of the system it is haunting. It was born at a time when this system, for a thousand reasons, can no longer base itself on the unadulterated, brutal, and arbitrary application of power, eliminating all expressions of nonconformity. What is more, the system has become so ossified politically that there is practically no way for such nonconformity to be implemented within its official structures.

Who are these so-called dissidents? Where does their point of view come from, and what importance does it have? What is the significance of the "independent initiatives" in which "dissidents" collaborate, and what real chances do such initiatives have of success? Is it appropriate to refer to "dissidents" as an opposition? If so, what exactly is such an opposition within the framework of this system? What does it do? What role does it play in society? What are its hopes and on what are they based? Is it within the power of the "dissidents"–as a category of sub-citizen outside the power establishment–to have any influence at all on society and the social system? Can they actually change anything?

I think that an examination of these questions–an examination of the potential of the "powerless"–can only begin with an examination of the nature of power in the circumstances in which these powerless people operate.

You hear this idea sometimes:

Don't waste a crisis.

That might mean some very different things, more than just the first bullet point below:

• Building a coalition committed to kicking out the bums and getting America back to what it was in, say, 2014.
• Same coalition, aimed at ejecting the dangerous ones and getting America back to what it was in 2014, with some new patches applied on the system flaws revealed by the current crisis.
• Building a coalition wider than we've seen in recent decades, committing to the needs of the new people joining in (people alienated or left out in recent decades) and patching the American system, for sure, but also expanding on the best parts. New protections to the system, new opportunities for citizens, new rights in place — after all, why should alienated people help restore the kind of America that alienated them in the first place?

Seems likely that Bernie Sanders is trying not to waste this crisis in this larger sense, and people are turning out to his rallies in larger and larger numbers.

Someone was complaining about a place in the Caribbean, saying, essentially, that people there had grown accustomed to distant, powerful others providing substantially for their local needs. It wasn't a subtle moment in the conversation, and with someone I'd just met I decided not to press for more of the reasoning — if any.

I have not spent much time in the region, so my impressions may be faulty. Anyway, here goes. You meet someone in the Caribbean. The more sophisticated as a user of the colonizer's language the person is, the closer you are standing at that moment to the machinery of wealth. Corporations, museums, strong schools, casinos, posh restaurants, curving beaches . . .

Which is the chicken and which the egg here? Probably both, probably it's a reinforcing loop. Drive away from the place where the colonizer's language is spoken well, and you drive toward poverty, readily visible even from a rented car.

Power begets power. The tools of power beget power and the emblems of power. You can often spot the less-than-powerful by the way they speak. They were brought up and educated outside the palace gates, so the language clues are only natural.

* * * 

This is the fifteenth blog post I have composed for akaKenSmith.com using the new WordLand software.

A nation may be tempted to put on the clothes of past adventures and to play the songs of previous generations, to salute what was saluted in the past, to gather up into a pantomime of courage that recalls the actual courage of the past.

But the past's challenges are past. If a nation is to rouse itself to a new courage, it must do so by turning toward the challenges of the new day. If this can't be done, then what follows is a mere puppet show, a costume drama, a farce even or a shadow play. 

Name the challenges of the new day with great care; speak precisely and forthrightly; cast off the shadows of the past and step forward; today is more than dark enough without them.

"I've been writing about it on my blog for many years."

That's a sentence a variety of interesting people might utter or post. It's a reminder that good new thinking and writing slides effortlessly down the screen and out of sight, into the archive, where it might be preserved and maybe located again someday. Maybe.

But it's also a reminder of a structural problem in blog-format web writing that people have understood for many years. Despite other real and substantial virtues, the format by itself leaves posts about a topic more or less isolated from each other down there in the archive.

Writing isolated from other writing on the same topic — that's not the best we can do. Writing that links and builds explicitly on other writing is far better.

Well, related posts can be tagged and categorized at the time of composition, but that takes focused habit-building as well as good insight about what tags make sense now and might be useful later. Related posts can also perhaps be located and pulled together later through time-consuming searching of an archive, which is an unpleasant approach. Using most tools available to us today, both tagging and searching are demoralizing. For most online tools, useful old-fashioned tools like an index or a concordance aren't available.

So many of us miss out on an opportunity.  By organizing several posts hidden in the archive we could piece together two valuable resources: 1) the history of something, which can help us know why we are currently blessed by and stuck with the version of it we have today, and 2) and the components of something, which can help us see how it functions on its good and bad days.

In those two ways, organizing several posts from the archive can make fresh analytical thinking and invention possible. But it's not easy to find and organize several posts from the archive.

My wording in italics below (posted here) was misleading, too compressed to be clear, or something like that:

One of the powers of composing on WordLand, I believe, is the ability to inform WordPress pretty much instantly which of your RSS feeds you'd like a post to belong to. Or to more than one RSS feed, as well, if I'm reading the clues properly.

I've gone back over the steps a second time, so I'll try to say what I had in mind more usefully now. To me, it matters because it's a subtle and kind of breathtaking feature with value well worth exploring.

• WordLand allows the writer to quickly select WordPress categories. 
• Each WordPress category comes with its own RSS feed.*
• So, in effect, selecting one or more categories in WordLand at the same time selects one or more WordPress RSS feeds for the post.

That's the main point, and a person could stop reading here.

Why is this so interesting?

Quick speculations about that:

• If over time a writer focuses on, say, three topics and, as a result, builds three audiences, the writer could easily point posts to each of those audiences via RSS.
• If a CoolSocialMediaTool came along that perfectly integrated posting via RSS, a category called CoSoMeTo could instantly post to that CoolSocialMediaTool.
• Etc.

How did I test this WordLand / WordPress link for myself?

What I did:

• I created a new WordPress blog with two categories. I called them testingOne and testingTwo.
• Writing in WordLand, I made three posts. The first post I sent to the new blog's testingOne category. The second post I sent to the testingTwo category, and the third post I sent to both of those categories.

What I expected to happen:

• I expected the blog's main page to show all three posts and the RSS feed associated with the blogs main page also to show all three posts.
• I expected the two posts that WordLand allowed me to quickly place in the testingOne category to show up on the blog's testingOne category page and also in the RSS feed associated with the testingOne category.
• I expected the two posts that WordLand allowed me to quickly place in the testingTwo category to show up on the blog's testingTwo category page and in the RSS feed associated with the testingTwo category.

What happened:

• What I expected to happen is what happened.
• The main blog page has all three posts and so does its RSS feed.
• The testingOne category blog page has the two posts I marked for that category while composing in WordLand and so does its RSS feed.
• The testingTwo category blog page has the two posts I marked for that category while composing in WordLand and so does its RSS feed.

I'm not saying I haven't overlooked something, but so far all I can see is a very useful feature residing at the intersection of WordLand and WordPress. Many or all other WordLand users may have already noticed it, I couldn't say. And I don't know if the feature is important to the long-term vision for the WordLand and WordPress intersection or not. But it does seem like a happy result of Dave Winer's quest to put an end someday to having to cut and paste your writing into another software space.

This blog post you might have just read to the bottom of is a fuller telling of my inadequate post from the other day.

_____________

*To locate a WordPress RSS feed: 

• Just add /feed to the end of the main page's URL for an RSS feed containing all posts. 
• For a category-only feed, click on the category name on any post. The category's blog page will open. Add /feed at the end of that category's URL. 
• In general, the format for a category's RSS feed is blogsFullUrl/category/coolCategoryName/feed — two examples are linked above.