> But what is the big deal? I notice a tendency for folks in the tech
> subculture who have antiauthoritarian politics to get a bit carried away
> about the radical possibilities of this or that program or platform; how
> they're inherently socialist or anarchist or whatever; like after the
> revolution society will produce and consume according to a great big
> participatory utopiapedia online. Eh. Hey, to be honest, I go to the
> nyt for journalism before indymedia. These people, I find, often think
> that blogs are more important than they really are, and think that
> sending a mass email out about a protest is the same thing as doing real
> turnout for the protest. But the results of online politics coming into
> the material world are usually underwhelming. Call me old-fashioned,
> but, I'd rather learn to work on my car's transmission or run an MRI
> machine before learning to run an open source software, and don't think
> either of those things the key to social transformation.
I think that radical techies don't say enough about the political implications of their work. There is a dearth of material by radical techies that talk about what they do. This is one reason why I've decided to write an article about the anarchists aspects of FOSS. I got tired of reading stuff that frames the subject in a way that I disagree with. But rad techies aren't doing enough to win the battle of our story.
I can understand where you are coming from this, but I think you grossly underestimate the power of online organizing. I remember being a student activist back in the days where you had to run around and tape up flyers about a meeting or protest. The Internet magnifies your political power by many orders of magnitude. I've been running the Infoshop.org website for 12 years (as of this week) with the input and help of hundreds of people. That website has probably reached millions of people. This is a completely different level than publishing an anarchist magazine with a circulation of 15,000 people.
The results of online organizing by radical activists is underestimated by radical activists. I even underestimate it much of the time. The power of online organizing hits home when you read RAND reports on online activism or find out that the police have spent several million dollars to prepare for protest that was mostly organized online.
I also think that offline organizing is undervalued. Many radical activists have shallow skillsets when it comes to offline organizing. There needs to be more training and skills-sharing.
Chuck -------------------------- Bread and Roses Web Design serving small businesses, non-profits, artists and activists http://www.breadandrosesweb.com/