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 Sunday, May 26, 2002
The claim on the MLWebblog that "Democracies are fragile, unstable things," relates to yesterday's thoughts on Jonah Goldberg and the idea that conservatives want us to be "lazy." Citing this study from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, MLWebblog says:
 I believe corporate influence has so adjusted the law of this country that the will of the people has been replaced by the will of the boardroom. 
It's a little hard to argue with that. 9:26:06 AM 
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Global Justice supporters have created a sort of example of Imagineering (see previous post) with this site, which makes you think that the WTO is admitting it's responsible for a lot of human and ecological suffering. Of course, the page is a spoof, and I'm not sure whether the fact that it's so hard to tell it's a spoof makes it a more successful example of Imagineering, or less. To be fully successful, it seems it would need to clearly tell readers that this is the truth that the WTO refuses to admit, followed by pointers to what readers can do if they would like to see the WTO actually admit these things. In other words, I wonder if good imagineering requires that you:
- reveal the illusion as illusion -- a dream we wish were true, yet still a dream -- and,
- tell people how to make the dream a reality.
Either way, it certainly seems to me that many bloggers are already Imagineers, in various ways. Whenever you find a "news" article and tell your readers what that article is leaving out or reveal the motives behind its spin, you're helping your readers see the world a different way. You're also giving an example of how "news" could be "reported" differently in order to, possibly, become more useful. 9:04:30 AM
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If you're still not sure what all this copyright, intellectual property, Napster-related hubbub is all about, just ask Doc. He seems to be a BigMedia ventriloquist. Here's what BigMedia is saying to Congress (according to Doc ):
The Web is a content distribution system that needs to be protected by digital rights management hardware and software, through every cog in every conveyor belt that runs from producer to consumer. The only beings that matter are companies. The Web was a nice experiment, but now it's time to get down to business and extend the world's supply-controlled malls and theaters into every consumer's home, car, PC and Walkman.
That's so true. Remember, the above quote is not literally what BigMedia has said to Congress, but it more accurately reflects what BigMedia means when it says other things. In a way, Doc's little exercise in ventriloquism is sort of the inverse of what something called the "Co-Intelligence Institute" (CII) refers to as "Imagineering" (scroll down to Item 6). CII explains:
 Imagineering to me embraces any use of the imagination to actually create (or try to create) the imagined reality. A supreme example is The Monkeywrench Gang, a novel which provided the story out of which Earth First! arose, born of those who decided to live out the story of sabotaging billboards and earth moving equipment. Walden Two and The Turner Diaries are other imagineering stories which generated real activities.
In 1988 I did a participatory imagineering experiment at a Green Gathering: I created a small journal called The Ecotopian Grapevine Gazette, which contained news articles about neat things that hadn't happened yet, but which we wanted to have happen, written AS IF they had happened. Then, at the end of each article, I put a contact name around whom people could gather who wanted to make that story a reality. 
Thus, as an "Imagineer" you write things that aren't actually true, but which you want to be true. What Doc has done is write what is true but which no one is really saying. Either way, you expose people to a new way to see the world. The Imagineer exposes people to the possible but not yet realized, while Doc exposes people to the realized which is carefully hidden by BigMedia. So Doc's ventriloquist exercise needs an Imagineering counterpoint. How would we rewrite Doc's ventriloquism to reflect the vision of the Web we want to become reality? (In a way, a lot of Doc's blog posts are about what the Web should be, but I'd like to see a concise paragraph that rewrites the above as if Doc were testifying before Congress....) 8:51:26 AM
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