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?

E. B. White wrote a remarkable essay about visiting the winter rehearsal headquarters of a big circus. He sees something quietly remarkable there, and sets out to preserve the memory of it in his sentences, saying: “As a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly or unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost. But it is not easy to communicate anything of this nature.”

In the end, knowing that he may have failed at the task, he notes that at least “I have discharged my duty to my society; and besides, a writer, like an acrobat, must occasionally try a stunt that is too much for him.”

The essay is called “The Ring of Time” and can be found in Essays of E. B. White, in The New Yorker archive, and elsewhere.

When certain politicians say something is common sense, they mean that it makes sense to them, and should to you, without being examined or discussed. Which means they don't intend to show why it might make sense. So in calling something common sense, what that sort of politician means is that people who agree with that sort of politician's ideas will surely agree with this idea, and no further elaboration is required. Why go on and on? It's just common sense. Surely you agree with common sense, don't you? And it's just common sense not to let anyone sense that you don't agree with common sense.

What does a social media post — in this case a brief YouTube talk — look like when it goes far beyond the "It's bad! They're so bad!" approach of many op-eds and social media postings? In an earlier posting, I suggested that they offer p_attern recognition, instructive historical cases, and techniques for action_. Beyond "it's bad!" is an event that needs to be understood as part of a pattern. Then we need to see parallel cases that can help us think about our options going forward. And then we need concrete, specific action items that have a chance of making a difference. That's a rich, powerful posting whether it's on the op-ed page, on a blog, or in a YouTube posting.

Tad Stoermer reaches for this kind of posting, this kind of analysis and useful action-oriented advice. In one recent episode devoted to the cancellation of Stephen Colbert, Tad Stoermer discusses:

1. A brief discussion of how top-down silencing works.
2. What’s at stake now for Colbert. (details)
3. An argument that other, more important things are at stake behind the Colbert news.
4. Congressional appropriations process is being trashed.
5. Gutting NPR, PBS, etc., as the real top-down power play here, not the threat to a famous person.
6. An avenue of truth is eliminated: that’s real silencing. Colbert will be back somewhere.
7. Power of fiction for protecting bad governments. Public media as a threat to their fictions.
8. We need parallel institutions to stand up when systems are captured or destroyed by bad government. Don’t beg for access from tyrants, create alternate information pathways.
9. Examples of this process of creating parallel institutions from history: US revolution: Committees of Correspondance, patriot-created networks. Anti-slavery had information circulating. Underground news in Nazi Germany.
10. Free press is a precondition of functioning resistance.
11. Colbert is not the central issue. He’ll land somewhere.
12. Now rebuild public media, liberating it from corporations and parties. Examples given quickly.
13. Build an institution they can’t touch. Use it. Improve it, make it vital for resistance.

14. That’s the work now.

Stoermer''s brief video gives us concrete analysis and action items. He offers us a chance to start thinking, Yes, there's a struggle ahead, but we are now more fully armed with understanding about how power and resistance both work.

After a strong, detailed analysis of how "Trump's Big Bad Bill Will Kill Americans," authors Jeremy Barofsky and Pamela Herd offer this brief action paragraph:

If the bill’s impact is clearly disseminated and its supporters pay a political price at each implementation step, there is real hope that the worst effects to the nation’s health may not come to pass. By organizing in response, based on evidence, a brighter future with better health and enhanced economic security can become reality.

I suspect that they are correct about the steps they recommend: 1) organize in response to the threat, 2) in speech and actions based on the evidence clearly disseminate the bill's impact, and 3) make the bill's supporters pay a political price at each implementation step.

I also suspect that most Americans don't know how to do 1), 2), or 3). Very handy for the current administration . . .

But I must say that many op-eds and social media posts don't even bother to attach a final paragraph of that kind to their argument about a current event.

On the web, it would not be difficult for writers to include links even inside brief lists of action items: links to people who've shown how to do what needs to be done, for example. Links to accounts of activism that break down the action items into a more detailed toolkit of active citizenship that has a chance to succeed, for example. Links to people doing the work on a particular issue right now and clues about how to learn from them and affiliate with them.

Write pieces that take advantage of the web and of the web's power to link. Write and publish in web-savvy ways. We're crazy not to.

We're crazy not to. We're crazy not to. We're crazy not to.

In this crisis, there are only two kinds of social media posts, two kinds of op-eds in the world.

The first kind says that something is horrible. No shortage right now, for example, of op-eds and posts saying that it's horrible that top-down political pressure may have caused the cancellation of the late night political commentary of Stephen Colbert. Essentially:

"It's bad! The people who are doing this are bad! Bad!"

The second kind extracts a revealing pattern from the experience. Pattern recognition. The second kind locates techniques for making a useful real-world response. For action. This sort of thing:

The powerful have particular techniques for silencing the Fourth Estate. This is how we think they are using them right here and right now with Colbert's parent company. And here are concrete examples from history of essential work-arounds. For resistors to power, the specific principles for concrete action in urgent cases like this are . . .

True enough — most op-eds and social media posts don't take the time to include any of that good second-kind *stuff** that would earn them real honor in the world.** But some do. Here's one concrete example of Tad Stoermer posting that way.

And yes, you caught me making a third kind of social media post, the kind that divides the world into two kinds of this or that.

*_Pattern recognition, instructive historical cases, and techniques for action_.

**That's why most social media posts and op-eds are utterly forgettable. (But do not have to be.)

An Italian this-date-in-history site gives the impression that a certain day in July of 1997 was a notable moment in the development of blogging. With software development, maybe it wasn't so much a certain day as a certain period of time, but what do I know?