There is nothing I would rather believe than to think that community-based DIY activity offers great potential for social transformation. Unfortunately, this sounds like another variation on "think globally, act locally" -- a spur to hyper-localized activism that never coalesces into anything significant on a society-wide basis.
Carl Remick ----------
Sure, I agree. But read a little further. The point wasn't just building a small local scene. The larger point is to use something like computers to do it, but which also provide the means to directly expand. The problem with a lot of local organization is communication--getting beyond the immediate region.
One of the best things about Johnson's War on Poverty programs was you had to go to Washington every year for proposal and grant reviews. The effect of meeting everyone else engaged in essentially the same activities, facing very similar problems, as to say the least explosive. When Nixon wanted to kill all this activism off, he couldn't just shut off the money--although he tried.
He re-organized the executive branch agencies most involved, by decentralizing them--disbanding the Washington based offices and re-distributing the staffs into the regional offices. This killed off exactly the kind of coalescence that was occurring--turning into national solidarity movements over issues of poverty, race, education, and law. Remember all his crap about state's rights? The point to that had nothing to do with state government power, it had to do with getting the liberals and progressives out of the federal system by turning them out to their little hidebound, provincial regions. So it worked really well particularly in the South. Ironically in the West, region nine offices were in San Francisco, so these maintained their liberal-progressive bias. But that sense of national solidarity was effectively killed by this re-organization.
Nixon was great at this sort of nastiness. He called his de-centralization of the poverty programs, the new federalism, of all things.
At any rate, so the point was to build up a communication system so at least local activist scenes could talk to each other. Unfortunately, I am not too thrilled about something like unix for PC's as the means, because it is hard to learn and doesn't have an once of consumer appeal. What you get on old hardware is raw text on black screens. Don't get me wrong. It works fine, it is fast, and it does everything well. But it ain't pretty. If you use the newer more expensive graphic based hardware--which then defeats the point to being free--you are lead directly to being turned into one more consumer of cyberspace bullshit.
On the other hand, since most of the rest of the world is trying to ramp itself up into cyberspace, and other countries have all sorts of weird and old equipment, the positive side to the unix-based scene is that it can be used on most of this old junk. While I was following the newsgroups to figure out how to set up and run some of the programs, I noticed that there was a lot of foreign interest--particularly from Asia. I suspect the reason has to do with the fact that FreeBSD has keyboard layouts and screen fonts for many of the Asian languages--you just configure the system around them and it works the same. All the European language alphabets are available so there were a fair number of postings from eastern Europe and Russia. Anyway Germany, Netherlands, and Japan had the most foreign posters.
Later this week, I am going to try to meet with the guys running the high school shop and see if they are interested.
Chuck Grimes