Message: 8
Date: Wed, 05 Feb 2014 00:16:28 -0800
From: GtwoG PublicOhOne <g2g-public01@att.net>
To: David Keenan <dkeenan44@gmail.com>
Cc: "sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org"
        <sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org>
Subject: [sudo-discuss] Kapital & ideas (long posts), was Re:  Sudo!
        Wanna co-host this surveillance event?
Message-ID: <52F1F35C.7020507@att.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"


>>>>>>
Agreed, there are times when one has to choose one's fights, and not
everyone chooses the same fights at the same times.  Looks like we agree
about fair use, anonymity, mesh, and the movement for self-ownership of
personal data.


Fighting back with ideas:

Majorly agreed re. "fight back ...with ideas."  And "...all the tech in
the world won't help if people don't give a hoot because they're too
exhausted by the Spectacle-induced trance of capital etc. to care, or
don't see why its necessary or in their self-interest."  This point is
HUGE, and it's rare to find others in the tech universe who get it.  Too
often we confuse the tools with which we build, and the things we build,
with the purposes for which we build.

Martin Luther King had a dial phone and a typewriter.  He changed the
world with the power of his ideas.  Today each of us has a supercomputer
on our desk and/or in our pocket, and can reach an audience of millions
in the time it takes to blow our noses.

What we lack is an idea: but not just "an" idea, rather a set of ideas,
an ecosystem of ideas that, taken together, open a new view of the world
and ourselves in it, and inspire people to think deeply and act
courageously.

We've inherited a fortune in ideas from all of history, and yet it
appears that something is missing, something that could form a bridge
over which we can walk from the past and present into the future.
Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that happiness is not
identical with meaning.

The Spectacle and the circuses can produce happiness, but what they
don't produce is a sense of meaning.  Instead we're told, often by our
peers, that the most rational view is that life is meaningless, that the
universe has no purpose, and that only a religious or romantic fool
would believe otherwise.  But two NOTs don't make an AND: so what we're
left with is a proverbial hole in our soul and nothing to fill it.  "The
universe is DEAD!" is hardly a rallying cry for sustainability, much
less for revolution.