[wordup] Anil Dash - Make the Revolution

[Adam Shand]

This reminds me a lot of Cory Doctorow's near future science fiction book
"Makers" ... and I love it.  Go the makers.

Adam.

Source:
http://dashes.com/anil/2010/09/when-the-revolution-comes-they-wont-recognize-it.html
Via: http://twitter.com/#!/timoreilly/status/25818696885

Anil Dash
September 28, 2010

Malcolm Gladwell gets started with "The revolution will not be tweeted"
in this week's New Yorker, condemning social media's ability to enact real
cultural change with an argument he sums up early in the piece:

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem
> to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that
> signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the
> same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.


Who are the "they"? It's not really clear. But even as someone who's had an
"evangelist" title in the past, I don't come to refute Gladwell's strawman
argument. His point is that today's social networks are fundamentally unable
to drive the sort of social change that fueled upheavals like the civil
rights movement. I agree; As I said last year, Facebook often enables
politics of the sort that convinces college kids that changing their middle
name on a website is a form of activism. And the idea that the uprisings in
Iran were driven by Twitter or any other social media is clearly refuted by
realities such as Hossein "Hoder" Derakhshan, the father of the Iranian
blogosphere, being sentenced to nineteen years in prison. The traditional
method sit-in and picket-in-the-streets form of protest is clearly a failure
online.

TAKE A BATH, HIPPIE

The problem with Gladwell's premise, though, is that it's wildly
anachronistic to think that the only way to effect social change is to
assemble a sign-wielding mob to inhabit a public space. I cringe in
anticipation of the day when the Tea Party realizes their protest marches
will be as ineffective as the even more massive anti-Iraq war rallies were
seven years ago. People who want to see marches in the streets are often
unwilling to admit that those marches just don't produce much in the way of
results in America in 2010.

However: There are revolutions, actual political and legal revolutions, that
are being led online. They're just happening in new ways, and taking subtle
forms unrecognizable to those who still want a revolution to look like they
did in 1965. Gladwell is absolutely right to say that political action today
takes place in the form of many smaller, simpler steps than it did when one
used to have to put livelihood, liberty, or even life on the line to make
change happen. That doesn't mean it's ineffective, just that it's a million
small protests instead of one visible act. For me, it's a form of protest
that feels much more Asian in its methods, with a steady trickle of small
rebellions instead of the traditional western model of the visible, violent,
aggrieved uprising. The evolution in the tactics of social change is what
inspired the question I was trying to ask earlier this year:

Imagine if half a million people marched on Washington, collectively broke
> federal law, did it in plain sight of the world's leaders and traditional
> media, and yet we all barely noticed? What if political leaders didn't even
> see it as a political act, but instead as some sort of funny stunt?


We have had an enormous and concerted act of social disobedience play out
over the past half-decade, where millions have decided that the present
regime of intellectual property law and corporate control over the way we
communicate is no longer tenable. So, every day, with the click of a button,
people from all walks of life are ignoring the law and protesting in public,
simply by uploading content to YouTube or Facebook or anywhere else.

The disobedience is not just online. This past weekend, at the same
venerable fairgrounds that hosted the 1964 World's Fair in Queens, Maker
Faire finally found its way to New York City, after phenomenal events in
California, the U.K., and Texas. Maker Faire (and Make magazine) were
founded by the mild-mannered Dale Dougherty, whose quiet demeanor suggests
he's anything but a radical, and whose own statements would, I'm sure,
insist that he's just having fun, not doing anything political. The reality,
though, is that Dale Dougherty is the man who coined the phrase "Web 2.0" (a
concept potent enough that "2.0" has been applied to every discipline from
sex to, yes, civil rights). He's got a knack for identifying where society
is headed. And he's in a community that's doing a great job of getting
organized.

THE MAKER PARTY

Today, Dale Dougherty and the dozens of others who have led Maker Faire, and
the culture of "making", are in front of a movement of millions who are
proactive about challenging the constrictions that law and corporations are
trying to place on how they communicate, create and live. The lesson that
simply making things is a radical political act has enormous precedence in
political history; I learned it well as a child when my own family's
conversation after a screening of Gandhi turned to the salt protests in
India, which were first catalyzed in my family's home state of Orissa, and
found out that my great-grandfather had walked alongside Gandhi and others
in the salt marches that followed. Today's American Tea Partiers see even
the original "tea party" largely as a metaphor, but the salt marches were a
declaration of self-determination as expressed through manufacturing that
took the symbolism of the Boston Tea Party and made it part of everyday
life.

To his last day, my great-grandfather wore khadi, the handspun clothing that
didn't just represent independence from the British Raj in an abstract way,
but made defiance of onerous British regulation as plain as the clothes on
one's back. At Maker Faire this weekend, there were numerous examples of
clothing that were made to defy laws about everything from spectrum to
encryption law. It would have been only an afternoon's work to construct a
t-shirt that broadcast CSS-descrambling code over unauthorized spectrum in
defiance of the DMCA.

And if we put the making movement in the context of other social and
political movements, it's had amazing success. In city after city, year
after year, tens of thousands of people pay money to show up and learn about
taking control of their media, learning, consumption and communications. In
contrast to groups like the Tea Party, the crowd at Maker Faire is diverse,
includes children and adults of all ages, and never finds itself in conflict
with other groups based on identity or politics. More importantly, the jobs
that many of us have in 2030 will be determined by young people who attended
a Maker Faire, in industries that they've created. There is no other
political movement in America today with a credible claim at creating the
jobs of the future.

MAKING A REVOLUTION

The debate now is whether the leaders of today's political movements with
the most potential for exceptional change will accept the mantle of
simply being political leaders. Because they're already having enormous
impact, and earning recognition from the President himself. President
Obama's acknowledgement came early, right in his inaugural address:

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is
> never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of
> shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the
> faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the
> pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the
> doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women
> obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards
> prosperity and freedom.


It wasn't the birthers or the truthers that earned the nod for helping shape
America's future: It was the makers. Their protests, their sit-ins, take the
simple form of making things and sharing them with each other, online and
off. The quietness of their ways, the heads-down determination of the
scientist instead of the chin-jutting attitude of the street fighter, might
make them easy to overlook. But that doesn't mean that it's not a
significant and enduring movement. it doesn't mean the will of these
millions of people doesn't count, simply because it's expressed in a way
that doesn't look like protest did five decades ago.

Best of all, the people who actually make these things happen aren't just
sitting around clicking "Like" on things online. As has been true since the
earliest days of the blogosphere, the best minds in social media get
together in person to help plan the future. One such event that you can
visit this weekend? The venerable ConvergeSouth. It takes place at
NC A&T State University, the proud home of the freshmen students who in 1960
held that first sit-in at Woolworth's.
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