revolution

So, the news from the centers of power is grim. Exceedingly grim. The Democratic Party is, as an institution, putting on a world-class clinic in organizational dysfunction. In complete control of the government, they have failed to make any significant achievements over the course of a full year. Their only big move, last winter's stimulus plan, has been roundly understood to be too timid, and as a result the economy, while still existent, is in a prolonged "jobless recovery" limbo.

Then last week's one-two combination of truly devastating news. First the pseduo-aristocratic nomination of a Kennedy-family apparatchik to succeed old Teddy in Massachusetts going down in flames to a right-winger in a pickup who flat out wanted it more. Scott Brown did five times as many public events as Coakly, had a hot-shit new media team (running Drupal), and surged at the end to take the win. That's Edward Kennedy's seat, going to a rather immoderate Republican, and bringing an end to the 60-vote theory of power in the Senate.

Republicans Seize 41 - 59 Senate Majority

That seems ridiculous, but it's more or less true. As a fighting entity, the Democratic Senate is somewhere below slime-mold in effectiveness. They lack any coherent vision, and the leadership simply does not have the will to utilize power. Obama's plan of rational and honest engagement with his opposition has yielded zero policy results, and his inability or unwillingness to strongly define himself or his agenda as anything other than "the establishment with brains" has resulted in an epic collapse in his polling numbers. Meanwhile, unemployment remains at 10% and people are fucking pissed off that Hope and Change appears to have been merely a slogan, used to elect a very eloquent chump.

Against this backdrop, the Supreme Court has ruled once again that Corporations are People and have 1st amendment rights to political speech, meaning they can now spend unlimited sums on influencing the outcomes of elections. Organized Labor being a shadow of its former self, it seems the near-term outlook of the US political system is pretty damn dim. Established economic interests are going to continue dominating national politics for the foreseeable future, likely until some external/existential event forces larger-scale change.

In terms of how this plays out, I think the Democrats are going to get shellacked in the upcoming 2010 elections, which will likely result in increased timidity on their part should they retain majorities. Net-net: two years of gridlock in DC. While the economy will likely improve organically by the time 2012 rolls around, it seems unlikely that it will really get zooming since the ability of the state to effectively re-orient things away from massively unproductive activities like tract home building and financial skimming appears to be nil. People will still be upset, underemployed, angry, and looking to blame. Meanwhile the coalition of unlikely voters who rallied behind Obama in 2008 are demoralized and may stay home, as unlimited corporate money pours in to fill the void.

In brief, the Black President is looking down the barrel of a one-term legacy with no policy achievements. His putative successor on the right would almost certainly lack substantive remedies to the problems of our time — "let the market sort it out" will, um, not work — but would almost certainly possess a will to utilize power and a savvy team of political manipulators. The hegemon becomes most militarily active in its period of decline.

While I hope to be proven wrong — there's always a hope in my heart that we'll have an awesome montage-worthy darkest-hour-turnaround, but I can't do anything about it but hope — the vegas line favors a real shitshow. Even if we get a crappy beachhead of Health Care Reform, that's all we'll get, and we'll likely have to wait for generational turnover to get a chance like this again.

Thus: back to the drawing board. In the emerging environment, agents of change will need to move laterally, so simply/directly set about acquiring power and building parallel institutions to the establishment. We will need to out-compete large corporations to regain control of the state, or possibly to obsolete the state by finding other ways of doing for ourselves. Either way, no small task. Demographics are ostensibly on our side, but without a lot of organizing that won't mean much. We'll need to develop a whole set tools and the reasons to use them if we're going to have much of a chance.

Thus: mission statements.

This is an experiment, a process of becoming. I don't know the answers, but I have a sense of the questions. I know the future will be different from the past, and I'm though with waiting for that to be defined by anyone else. The sooner we start living the way we want the world to be — the more contagiously, courageously and publicly we do this — the more influence we can have over the changes to come.

And change is coming, no doubt about it. It's time to roll the dice, shoot the moon, bet the farm; because if not now when? If not us who? If not this, what? Risk is our business, fortune favors the bold, and I believe right-thinking people can take over this planet and usher in a golden era if only we have the will to do so. I want more power and more freedom and I want to bring joy to the people around me, to people around the world.

I take it on faith that a better world is possible, one in which all humans lead good lives, where we all work less and play more and no-one dies for stupid tragic reasons like a lack of clean water or mosquito bites. I take it on faith that war is an unnecessary evil, and that we can (indeed, must) recognize a shared fate as a species, and learn to get along together. I take it on faith that it is our destiny to explore the universe, to unlock its secrets, harness its energies, to dive deep, to fly high, eventually to live on other worlds. I take it on faith that the rate of human progress is more or less up to us, and I want to get there faster.

This is where I develop my theory and keep track of what happens when I try to put it into practice. This is where the structural hole becomes a node, where we cross the streams. This is the story of the rubber and the road, of what happens when you stop taking things on faith and start taking them into your own hands.

Power crisis in Iran. Revolution? It’s certainly something. Seems for real, with all of the opposition candidates (including conservative former head of Revolutionary Guard) calling Friday’s election stolen. Leading opposition candidate now under house arrest, and state forces clamping down on foreign media, jamming BBC satellites, locking down cellphone networks and internet access. Rumors of tanks, and video of riot police on motorcycles in the streets:

More:

Also, according to eyewitness accounts, gunshots could be heard last night until 3am in Elahiyeh, alongside chants of “God is great!” from people on their rooftops. This was a widespread tactic in the 1979 revolution, in which people were urged to take to their rooftops and shout “Allah-u Akbar.”

On the nerdly front, this is also fascinating. Far moreso than last year’s action in Burma, this is a revolution with an online component. Iran is much harder to seal off information-wise and so word is leaking out anyway. For anyone wondering how Twitter is good for anything, click here and wait for 10 seconds, when it will say something like “16 more results since you started searching. Refresh to see them.” Also good for pressuring old-school media.

Also different from Burma, the powers that be care about their ability to use networks as well, so there are spontanious denial-of-service attacks from the opposition. Goodness knows what will be possible once someone teaches people how to use popular benchmarking tools.

I hope it turns out well for the forces of Liberal Social Democracy, and with a minimum of bloodshed. We’ll see.

Some friends of mine have compiled a truly excellent video that explains (in about 30 minutes) the whole economic kerfluffle with the banks. If you’re curious about this, I strongly suggest you watch it:

Go fullscreen for a hulu-style experience!

The takeaway I agree with, and which I can explain with all sorts of business-like logic (and with plenty of slaps at Larry Summers), is that a more active and decentralized marketplace for finance offers us much better opportunities for both long-run stability — what Krugman and others have called “boring banking” — and continued innovation in terms of how to creatively set up deals to make things possible.

I think both are important, and the best way to get there is to not have a few giant mega-banks control the market. There’s no reason we can’t have a simple cap on scale — e.g. no single institution can have more than x% of the action, or else they have to figure out a way to spin off and divide amoeba-like — and still reward innovation and hard work in the private sector.

At long last, notes from my trip to South America.

3/8/09 The Great Escape
Passport scanned and security passed — metro mix-up rebounded w/cab score; Islam on the radio, honk-honk-honk at the girlblonde in VW Golf taking a slow approach to a fast merge. I am all but flying.

Body is sore from conference uptempo over the past five days. Animated action and nightly partytime reminding me I’m up against the three-oh and have lost a bit of bounce. It’s not just gutfat and buttsag, you know. The blood and organs feel their age as well.

An enlivening experience. Opening. Got a chance to kick it with my old colleague Mr. Moger for a bit — he’s tapped into the Beautiful People scene in government; it exists, I tell you: smart girls in paddington bear coats working for homeland security and the whole bit — as well as dear Howard Park, who gave me a lot of info and advice for Argentina.

It’s a funny thing. I’ve been un-attracted in general of late, and I find myself resenting the pressure to be someone or something, to sizzle, saddle up the savior faire and lead some freaky charge. Like that bit in Cool Hand Luke where he gets upset at the other inmates for living through hi,.

Seems like a symptom of depression, feeling put-upon like this. Means I don’t actually see myself in these ways: wild, fun, sexy, free. From whence came this beat-down creature of routine?

The first love is self love and without the zing and pop for my own enthusiasm for me, it turns out to be a bit much to maintain, the facade. Nobody likes living a lie.

So the stage is set, yet again, for re-invention, timed to coincide with an escape from the usual routines. And reading of old dead David Foster Wallace and the Icelandic Banking Crisis, and thinking of the slow revolution we live in, the turning of another cycle in The Great Transformation, I feel for a minute like a pretty special little guy.

But seriously, our old models are dead, and the reason I’m alone is because I haven’t loved myself enough to accept the same from anyone else, which is why confident happy people annoy me, and why in my history I get crazy lucky before reeling in a big fish. The unconsciously confident great dane of a man, scarfing up the world as his due.

And in this spirit will I find my bride of the revolution, because unless/untill I believe I can change the world (again), I’ve got a zero percent chance of attracting a mate with similar interest. How my workaday life fits in is an unknown, but in the buzzing afterglow of Drupalcon it feels like an imminently solvable problem.

3/9/09 Morning in S. America
Floating now over unknown country, an organic and gridless expanse of mottled green, brown and blue, drinking in the turgid riches of another hemisphere along with my semi-bland airline coffee.

Ambiensleep was a win. Big challenge of the day is to locate the Berquebus catamaran to Montevideo. Next up is customs, and the we find out just how degraded my spanish has become.

—-

BA like beautiful, sweaty, pre-boom New York City. Shared a cab into the city center w/a pretty pediatrician who was on my flight from DC. Mealy-mouthed self-conscious hush spanish at the sandwich place. Just enough to communicate. Mission is sunglasses.

Mission accomplished.

Passed through park with a great ancient tree which would have been killer for climbing in its prime. Now long limbs span over the parks stone walkway, propped up and braced at various strategic points. A living monument, in it for the long haul.

Passed a street protest, red banners and a giant Che, stalled along a narrow street where giant steel police barracades and riot cops blocked the way. Folks up front are ready for action — clubs, facemasks, a weary air of resignation — and warned me off taking photos of the cops.

Socialism is a real thing here, and people talk openly and seriously about class struggle. I’m more and more convinced that my revolution is different. Organizing Alynski’s “Have a little, want more” types. You revolutionize what you know.

The problem is that the putative “have a little want mores” are pretty comfortable back in the states. The infinity of consume lust notwithstanding, it’s unclear what they might actually want more of.

One path to address this is traditionally through vanguard-building, or through a long march to institutional control. That is, a motivated revolutionary elite gradually (or quickly, in the event of a coup) assumes control of existing levers of power, putting them (we hope) to better use.

This is both open to egregious watering-down, and prone to all the blind spots and pitfalls of elite organizational tactics. Just look at team Obama, opaque and cautious, tinkering with the existing machine as if all we need is to change the oil. Open source revolution this is not.

What might it mean when the servers liberate the champaigne from first class? Is it a blow for freedom, or just another greedy little score? Well dude, we just don’t know.

The “wanting more” must transcend the material plane, or at least the monetary. The Cuban revolution was possible in part because they really did bring health and literacy to the people, even in the midst of the struggle. No small feat. Our own American Revolution succeeded not because people wanted to stop paying taxes, but because the taxes they paid (plus everything else the crown demanded) were stifling real innovation and self-improvement.

The best revolutions focus on this kind of uplifting and liberation action, not on the destruction or overtaking of an existing order. The best revolutions are in a core and moral sense democratic — they widen the circle.

The US and most other “developed” places are set at most (and hopefully) for incremental progress and development, caring better for their people, creating and learning more, helping to solve big systemic problems like climate change, etc.

The emerging new global players (heavyweights like China and India, but also Brazil and a whole host of others) are on a faster track, and also unripe for fist-in-the-air revolution of the old type. Criminal cartels and indigenous liberation movements may challenge for local control, and unrest will continue, but a big takeover of collapse feels unlikely.

In the remaining pejoratively-termed “third world,” places getting mined and logged and not much else, who knows. The authorities are strong where there’s money to be made, and elsewhere the sheer poverty and wrechedness of life is a tragic damper on any sort of progress. Hard to have much of a revolution when your road is an open sewer.

So then maybe the hot spot is in the in-betweens, in the way we work as co-captains of Spaceship Earth, beyond our respective national boundaries. With ubiquitous global communication (including and implying commerce), we don’t have to rely on heads of state and elite gatherings in Davos to conduct diplomatic relations. Perhaps the big “want more” has something to do with being global, being free in that new way. Bears thinking, at least.

3/10/09 Montevideo
Disaster strikes, or rather adventure. No Marko at the dock, quite likely because of daylight savings, or because they don’t let people walk in, only out. In the city center now securing food, shelter, etc. Friendly guy at the internet cafe. Hippies. Looks like I’ll make it.

Great success! We meet at Independence Plaza. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

In the morning, meatloaf for brakfast and quick tutorial in local language:

• Todo bien: literally “all good,” but used a lot particularly in Uruguay
• ta-ta-ta: the equivalent of “uh-huh” or “sure”
• ¡Barbéro!: “barbarian”, meaning pretty fucking cool
• Ayeva: that’s how it is

• Muy importante: “very important”, but seemingly said a lot w/local flavor

It’s a shopping/mate day. We walk the heart of the city, saying goodby to Hotel Splendido and its many beauties — Hostel Barbie and the heartbreakingly lovely and gracious proprietess. The streets are alive and bustling.

Antique table trade in the plaza constitucíon, relics of the last regime. Stately old men smoking pipes. The many babes of Montevideo. We search unsuccessfully for mosquito netting, but Zya finds some summer clothes at the hypermart — 30 small clothing shops/stalls crammed inside a larger commercial building, like that parking lot on Lower Broadway.

Callemocho clinic at the sidewalk cafe where the waiter is the Hileme of Uruguay, and made a special trip to the store to get us some ketchup. A great hung-over mate day in the city.

Last night’s events were celebratory scotch in the “presidential suite,” awkward anti-oogling of Hostel Barbie, steak and wine dinner, room beers, hop on over to the Casino Raddison where we win about 600 pesos at roulette and a video slot called “Turkey Shoot” what mixed funk music with cracker sland, then out to the sidewalk cafe to blow the winnings on a shot of Johnny Walker Blue, followed by beer and a giant meat plate, then more beer (supercheap) across the street, with discussions of how we might have to heavy in on some pathetic Napoleonic machismo — we’re the world police, and were with the gays, bitches.

Morning came with a loud rumble and sticky parch, but we found our way to soufflet, espresso and meatloaf breakfast (muy importante). That closes the loop on the past 24 hours.

Currently on the bus to Punto del Diablo, observing the front of Uruguayan commerce flow by: lots of piles of firewood, cellphone stores, chineese cars, election posters, martial arts studios, bicyclists, pre-fab pools, solar power/water-heating. It’s an interesting mix. Dirt roads off the side, and the omnipresent litter, but still very modern in feeling.

—

(And now the coffeshop is closing. More notes later.)

Whoa. The revolution comes in violet, too:

AT LEAST 30-40 MORE STUDENTS JUST STORMED THE THIRD FLOOR OF KIMMEL, PUSHING PAST THE GUARDS WHO TRIED TO TRAP THEM IN THE STAIRWAY. STUDENTS ON THE INSIDE FORCED OPEN THE DOORS OF THE DINING HALL, PUSHING AGAINST NUMEROUS GUARDS, AND PULLED THE REINFORCEMENTS THROUGH THE BLOCKADE AND INTO THE DINING HALL.
THE STUDENTS OF TAKE BACK NYU! ARE NOT GIVING IN, WE ARE ONLY GROWING STRONGER. WE DEMAND NEGOTIATIONS – NOW!!!

http://takebacknyu.com/

Sheer awesomeness.

It’s nice to have a bloodless revolution every once and a while. It looks like America’s cool with the Black President, wants to smoke pot and uneasy about queers marrying. That last bit is disappointing, but is still just a matter of time.

Still counting ballots in lots of races. I’m pulling for Carolina and Missouri, and I do believe that Merkeley will blow past Smith in Oregon, as it’s a few thousand votes and Multnomah and Lane counties are only half in. Those are both the big population centers, and most strongly Democratic areas, so we should be good.

Anyway, working the day away. It was a big party in NYC. Hopefully a big party everywhere else too.

I believe the Black President is wrapping it up in terms of the election. This is looking a lot more like 96, 84 or 76 than 2000 or 04. That’s good.

So now there’s this: Obama campaign buys 30-minute time block on Oct 29th. My guess/hope is this will be a Perot-style policy demo. Our debt-based economy is rapidly collapsing, and as clever as Zack’s “25% hit on 401(k): five grand. President Obama? Priceless” line is, there’s a reality that shit’s real fucked up right now and it’s going to start hurting regular people, and badly, quite soon.

For my part, I agree with Zizek that we need a new theory, and I’m young and dumb enough to go one further and venture some guesses.

The sketchy wind-up:

• With the EPIC FAIL of free-market fundamentalism, the prevailing ideologies of the 20th century have all been knocked down. From marxism to capitalism, isolationism to neo-liberalism.
• Indeed, the only modern model which is currently thriving is the authoritarian/nationalist/command-capitalist hybrid the Chinese are running with, and my guess is as the global slowdown hits them in the gut they’re going to have some Interesting Times ahead as well.
• Without some kind of coherent means of looking at the world and the massive challenges (economic, social, thermodynamic, etc) we face, effective and lasting solutions are unlikely.
• The answer we seek lies in the ideas which are embedded in the Internet, and their ideal execution will be borne out over this new medium just as the last century utilized broadcast media and centralized computing.
• This new way forward — participatory democracy — is in vitally important ways post-bureaucratic, relying on the active and honest engagement of large numbers of citizen participants to be effective.
• Politically speaking, this is also important because instead of seeing “the people” as a mass to be stupefied or whipped into a revolutionary/reactionary mob, the goal here is to utilize the critical thinking skills of vast numbers of people.
• In the same way that bloggers realize “my commenters know more than me,” public officials of the 21st Century should be listening directly to their constituents, as opposed to, say, lobbyists. Listening in the sense of finding solutions, not just “feeling our pain” or getting a sense of public opinion.
• Paradigmatically, this isn’t just about information technology. The models we talk about for network resiliency have direct applications across the board: how the modern energy grid should be developed, how land-use and transportation should be shaped, and how taxation and issues of legal jurisdiction can be understood.
• As a for instance, rather than seeing the gap between how much money states like CA and NY pay to DC vs how much federal aid they receive, and calling it some kind of “wellfare,” the participatory democracy perspective sees this as fiscal load-balancing process.
• Same goes for progressive taxation. Powerful nodes within the network have a real interest in the wider ecosystem thriving as well. Conceptually, at least, this scales globally. And hopefully it will in reality too.
• The role of government can be seen as two-fold: firstly in providing/funding the low-level physical and social infrastructure (roads, clean air, internet, health care, security, etc) on top of which a free civilization (economy, culture, etc) is built and secondly in taking a proactive role in solving Public problems like poverty, disease, and global warming.
• The engagement of people vis-a-vis government — as citizens and as public servants — can be seen then in many ways: cyclicly designing, constructing, maintaining said infrastructure, and also in assisting with specific problem-solving or service initiatives.

• Ultimately we hope to see a transparent and responsive state which provides accurate real-time information on all its activities to citizens. We also hope to see a radically reconfigured relationship between offices of public service and the public itself, much closer to a peer-to-peer network than the representative/supplicant network which has been dominant for some time.

There are reasons to hope Obama is willing to go there at least for the theory ride part.

The hard nut issue is the power and money. If we can successfully devolve power out from the current gang of 535 Congresspeople and 500 or so high-level cabinet and sub-cabinet administrators, and into the hands of several thousand more actually-empowered public servants, that would be huge. Likewise it would be huge to utilize the federal budget in a true load-balancing capacity, and allow for much more control over spending at a state and local level.

That will be really hard political work, but it fits like a glove with our need for a New New Deal and a post-hydrocarbon economy. We can’t just patch up last Century’s models. We have to seriously and comprehensively re-tool, and there’s simply no way that can be done intelligently as a centralized top-down effort.

This is what I mean by “the revolution,” really.

Score one for the revolution:

I didn’t pay anything to download Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” last Wednesday. When the checkout page on the band’s Web site allowed me to type in whatever price I wanted, I put 0.00, the lowest I could go. My economist friends say this makes me a rational being.

Apparently not everybody is this lucid, at least not in matters related to their favorite British rock band. After Radiohead announced it would allow fans to download its album for whatever price they chose, about a third of the first million or so downloads paid nothing, according to a British survey. But many paid more than $20. The average price was about $8. That is, people paid for something they could get for free.

That’s $8M that the band just pocketed. Very nice. Considering most artists make between $1 and $2 per CD sold (and that’s after the label recoups their contracted recording costs), it’s a safe bet that this will shake up the industry. You can download yours here.

I paid for mine, the first time I’ve paid for recreational music in close to a decade. In the above-linked article, much is devoted to the “crazyness” of this notion, although the author seems to grasp the reasons why fans respond generously:

Some economists suspect that what is going on is that people get a kick from the act of giving the band money for the album rather than taking it for free. It could take many forms, like pleasure at being able to bypass the record labels, which many see as only slightly worse than the military-industrial complex. It could come from the notion that the $8 helps keep Radiohead in business. Or it could make fans feel that they are helping create a new art form — or a new economy.

I would argue that this “feeling” is far more than that. The media-industrial complex is in fact corrupt and culturally destructive, and with an increasing array of established artists coming to the end of their contracts (and more and more up-and-comers looking to not get locked in), I think this album is a very important step towards our collective emancipation from mental slavery.

It’s one of the great tragedies of our time that a primitive notion of economics is the dominant paradigm of understanding among the power elite. The social science of studying barter and truck is a great one, and has revealed some keen insights into humanity and the world, but it’s clearly limited even in its most sophisticated expressions, and downright misleading in the dominant econ 101 formulation.

The way I see it, people are generally motivated by a hierarchy of needs which are vastly more complex than the desire to accumulate money even if in many cases confused individuals sadly fixate on the latter as the answer to all problems. The quest for individual happiness, moreover, is itself quite complex, generally involving the attitudes and actions of other people. Once you move outside of a survival context, social forces matter hugely, and the emphasis within economics on the decisions of lone “rational actors” is a crippling liability in its usefulness in analyzing human nature, even in aggregate.

Anyay, I’ve been a moderate fan since their early breakthrough days on MTV’s “Buzz Clips.” Who among us did not have the hook from “Creep” stuck in their heads in the mid to late 90s? I say moderate because I’m not nearly as into them as others, and because I don’t really like all their stuff. While I respect them enormously as artists, I do find some of their work self-indulgent and boring. It goes with their territory of trying to make art rather than catchy music, but I don’t have to dig it, and that’s also part of the deal. On the other hand, some of their albums and tracks are simply fantastic and I’ve done some of my own art based on their work, so I gotta show them the love.

It’s great to see Radiohead leading the way into the post-record-label universe. I’ve been saying for years that they’re one of the few bands that are perfectly poised to do this, and their example should inspire others to jump ship. Here’s hoping.

Oh. And the album is pretty good too.

So, as regular readers will know, I write occasionally under the subject of revolution (older posts here). What do I really mean by this?

Mark and I have started discussing again an old idea of ours, The New Cultural Freedom Movement. It's a terrible phrase (though developing) as far as marketing is concerned, which reflects the state of our thinking. After more than a decade it's still pretty vague; but it's the best idea I've got going, so here's the shot.

Early on in teenagerdom, those halcyon years when you were immortal and unfettered and when the idea of pure raw rebellion ala ¡la reveloucion! was a lot more plausible, we hit upon a pretty good insight: our ability to individually drive change through direct acts was pretty limited. The real action was in inspiration and empowerment -- in turning people on -- and maybe the real _real_ action is in inspiring and empowering people to inspire and empower _other people_, making waves and ripples and shit like that. I turned on to movement politics early.

This never took any concrete shape for Mark and I and our peers, but the idea lives and animates many of the things we and other people do in life. My politics has largely been driven by this kind of stuff -- inspiration and empowerment -- and Mark's work serves many of the same ends also.

There's an ethos here too, a not-too-subtle distaste for consumer culture and contemporary risk-aversion, a rejection of fear; a preference for radical transparency, the honesty of outlaws. There's a healthy endorsement of the old standards of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, but all with a good heart. It's not about irresponsible excess -- we don't drive drunk -- but it is about peak experiences and heady good times.

The idea of the New Freedom Movement is to coalesce these ideas under a common brand or banner, and to begin promoting them aggressively, spreading the word, building alliances and spinning off franchises. There seems to be a real opportunity here. The internet is huge, and there are already hundreds if not thousands of individuals doing this in some form or another. It's a good time to inspire and empower people to inspire and empower people.

Details remain difficult to determine, but I'm beginning to feel more and more like the time to make a move is now. A more focused vision of what we want to achieve is necessary for the real spark of inspiration, and a more practical plan of action is needed to actually provide traction for empowerment, but the genesis of this lies in the ethos, or maybe a mythos... at any rate, something to believe in.

It starts with us believing in ourselves, which at the tender age of twenty eight is harder than it used to be. But it feels like we're going to try, and there will be more and better posts about this in the future.