Thank you Shava,
I so look forward to reading your posts. Spike On 10/07/2013 20:07, Shava Nerad wrote:
I have to say, this is why I am proposing we must turn to traditional community organizing, using the net only as a means of totally transparent communications at this point for organizing facilitations. We have a strong history in this country of successful insurgent formal nonviolent social movements. And I am afraid if we do not mobilize the consequences are in fact dystopian. We have two generations essentially detached not only from civic activism but largely from the social contract in general. I feel as though society is inviting renewal or despotism. So, what are we looking at? The vague shadows of a Spanish Civil War? I hope the hell not. Shadows of 1930s Germany is what I hear more often, ducking Godwin, but just reporting. The point is that there is one piece of compassion we might have here: while we are horrified as activists in a democracy in America regarding our government, our government -- our friends and people we see not as friends -- is somewhat justifiably horrified looking over our shoulders at the electorate. Government can not change the electorate in a democracy -- at least, not quickly. That really only works the other way around. Our people do not understand their own government any more. They have been reality engineered into a market-of-votes. Elections here are transmedia, and are game theoried to death. Party platforms are minor lore and backstory. Political principals that actually relate to real world consequences have very little place in electoral politics except as they are adopted as plot elements in the transmedia drama, which often holds no reliance, especially, on facts. If you have felt like every bit of this has been social engineering since about Clinton and Gingrich started influencing their parties, I think you would be right. Both men are very fond of a marketing/game theory chase to the middle. The DLC and the Contract for America both displayed strong ideological platforms while candidates pursued whatever it took to take the unaffiliated vote. So we entered the age where everyone complained that the parties were indistinguishable. For decades. Until that became, in market research, too unpopular. Nearly instantly, our two dominant parties went, in the public perception, from being indistinguishable, from having always been too polarized and unable to work with one another, ever. And, although this made approval ratings of Congress as a whole drop (at 11-17% now but they have no reason to fear consequences), it made approval of your local congresscritters go up -- your own delegation is seen as aggressive, fighting for you, and standing up to bad government. Teflon. And totally unaccountable. We are so fucked. This is the perfect morph of "we have always been at war with Eurasia" in politics. You have to be carefully taught... This is not an electorate. It's an arena of futbol yahoos who never had a chance to learn what it means to be a citizen of a democracy, drunk on cheap beer and cheering for the guys wearing the right color uniforms, and ready to brawl with the other fans if they lose. This is why, yes they are outraged about Prism -- they have been taught to be outraged because in a neuromarketing sense, it retains their attention quivering at the TV for three minutes through the next series of ads, and they retain more information from those ads and are grateful for their soothing effect, so it makes for greater brand affinity. So as long as Snowdon keeps adrenaline moving as political porn, he will get equal time on CNN, MS-NBC, and FOX News, and as soon as he stops selling stuff, the sleeping giant will roll over and go back to hibernation until next crisis or the Superbowl. Like a light switch, by manufactured consent, the spotlights will go off, go on again perhaps as a footnote if some bad consequences happen to Snowden after the NSA decides enough people don't care any more, then fade, entirely, to black. But it is possible to change things. It takes the ones who are still learning, and that means the young, the geeks, the intellectuals. It takes forming a movement based on principals, so it doesn't rely on one set of people coming up with ideas. It must be nonviolent and coherent with how the current system purports to work (and often that ends up working against the system as a shaming mechanism). I am hoping it will be multipartisan, but I am pretty unabashedly old-line liberal and conservative-friendly -- my attitude is that politics is RvR gaming and beers after, and geeks are good at fighting fair in design meetings. ;) I want to open source politics. It's gotten ikky, and it's getting ikkier, but contrary to popular belief, it isn't inherent on all scales. And it's gotten worse rather than better due to people neglecting the institution. Someone has to clean the loos dammit, or they get gross. It's part of co-operative living. We can't get rid of politics. If we don't open it all up, document it, get a million young people involved in a Great Hunt to discover how we got here and how their birthright can be recovered from the political power mongers -- we won't have a democracy. Besides, this is the biggest most amazing best programmed LARP there is. There are actually some great aspects to spending your time on civilization rather than Civilization(tm). ;) Why spend time on bread and circuses when you can engage the real thing? So, this is not a "civic game" or gamification. This is using the net as organizing for social ends with perhaps a metaphorical idiom of gaming, the hunt, the quest, the Hero's Journey. Because I don't think it's an exaggeration that this is an asymmetrical war, however nonviolent, we are entering into. No less than King or Mandela or Gandhi went into. Our government is trapped in error and I see no way except to bring the people to bail them out, and as was so in any of those prior peaceful civil wars, we have friends inside, but years of work ahead. #bluerosemovement Yrs, SN
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