Jim Moore’s blog: Innovation, Strategy, Public Policy

Last night at 3:00 AM I was awakened by music.  Since I live in the woods west of Boston, this was strange.  Crawling from bed and following the siren call through the house, I discovered that somehow my TIVO was playing audio through five channels of surround sound.  The singer was kind of mock country–highly produced, close to falsetto–and beautiful enough to be surreal listened to from near sleep.

I turned off the machinery and stumbled back to my bed. As I lay in bed I had the strongest sense that media had finally passed me by–that I could never approach the sound of that voice, the clarity, the beauty, the sheer production quality.  And this deeper and richer life, this mediated life, had so saturated my world that I was finally defeated as a voice–relegated to the role of a simple supplicant and consumer.  Never again would I think that I might be able to participate in my time, because to be a player in my era is to participate in the media, to play on that stage.

And I had the sense that most Americans feel that way–relegated to the audience–marveling at those larger than life images up there on that towering Super Bowl half-time extravaganza platform, exploding with flash and fire.

Maybe media is the cancer on the planet–not energy-squandering, population-exploding human society–but rather the noosphere that I usually champion so enthusiastically.  Like a more fluid, seamless and insidious version of the “machines” in the Matrix, media is finally solidifying its penetration of our individual and collective consciousness.  Media’s heavier-than air influence is flowing across the planet, creating a blanket of comforting falsehood as it suffocates our true dreams.

As Bob Dylan said, “everybody’s having them dreams.”

And then I woke up this morning to the more mundate business news. The lead story is that Comcast is going to try to acquire Disney.  Why am I not surprised?

A word of thanks to the online political community.

Today I am thinking about what you have given to DFA and to the other campaigns. I am inspired to write a word of thanks.

Across the all of the Democratic candidacies and campaigns, you have
created an online-supported grassroots movement with no
precedent.  Whatever the next phase, I feel safe predicting that
it will also be without precedent and unpredictable.

Thousands of you use the online tools and platforms of the movement,
often daily.  You have established communities around homepages,
blogs, email, and a multitude of other services.  You have
contributed to a rich literary history of the campaign, written into
blogs and archived on our servers.

Many of you helped create the software we all use.  In some cases
you helped write applications directly.  In other cases the
movement incorporated in services the software that is part of the
“knowledge commons” of shared intellectual property developed in the
open source software movement.  In still others, your companies
have co-evolved with us, to create a new, proliferating industry to
support people organizing for political power.

Thanks to you!  Thanks for your very special creative
participation.  We will keep faith with each other as we move
forward together.

Finally, as a community we celebrate the personal and political
freedoms we enjoy on the Internet:  Freedom of speech, freedom
from censorship, the right to online privacy, freedom of assembly and
affordable access are especially important to the future of our
political participation.  We do not take these things for
granted.  These freedoms are assured only if we continue to value
and fight for them.