If one assumes that political reform is long, slow, and painful, hierarchies and centralizing strategies can be productive. After all, they can keep the movement on target and give it some coherent shape. Ideas on their own do not change the world; ideas that are coupled with smart institutions might. “Not by memes alone” would be an apt slogan for any contemporary social movement. Alas, this basic insight—that political reform cannot be reduced to the wars of memes and aesthetics alone, even if the Internet offers an effective platform for waging them—has mostly been lost on the Occupy Wall Street crowd.9 Challenging power requires a strategy that in many circumstances might favor centralization. To reject the latter on philosophical grounds rather than strategic grounds—because it is anti-Internet or anti-Wikipedia—borders on the suicidal.

now evolving into Federated WordPress

But this is the one that I want to get you: If you can bear to hear the truth you ’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, What it’s saying is: you say something that you think it’s true, and somebody out there takes what you’ve said and then twists it to trap somebody else who either admires you or doesn’t like you. What is said in the poem I didn’t understand, but being in the software free community I’ve really seen that. We work really hard to find the truth: what’s important, what will work, how can we move forward.

Kathi