Cargo Cult Activism New essay on Pie and Coffee; somehow marked as published a week ago, rather than yesterday. Didn’t want you to miss it.
Google Fiber, Worcester, and the Broadband Market
Worcester, like many communities, is working hard to bring the Google Fiber for Communities pilot program to the city, so residents and businesses can get Internet access “more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today.” Yochai Benkler, one of my intellectual heroes, headed a recent Berkman Center study of America’s screwed-up Internet market, and the mediocre Internet access we get as a result. If you’re wondering why cities are begging Google to bring them services that phone and cable companies won’t, this interview is a clear and detailed intro to the subject. Read the rest of this entry »
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas–he’s the controller–and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land.
Activists can think this way, too. We’ve seen something work in the past, and so we try it again. Sometimes the underlying situation, power dynamics, and participants are very different, so the tactic or strategy doesn’t work. If we understand why it worked the first time, we can modify it to work in the present. But too often, if it doesn’t work, we just try it again with more passion. I mean, it worked for the Civil Rights struggle/labor movement/Gandhi/right here in this town in the 90s. Why wouldn’t it work for us today?
The South Seas cargo cultists didn’t realize that the important thing about a radio was what was inside, not what was outside. We should step back more often to analyze what we’re doing, to create tactics and strategies that work like the effective ones of the past, rather than just looking like them.
I’d bet we can avoid some of the worst of “cargo cult activism” by asking a few questions of the next thing we’re planning to try. Why do we think this will work? What’s a recent example of this working? How well do we understand that example? Did it work the last time our group tried it? If not, why not?
Reflecting on fasting and action to close Guantanamo
posted by Mike on January 23rd, 2010
Yesterday was the 12th and final day of the fast. It was spent, by many, in jail. For the others, it was a day of cooking food, roaming the corridors of the courthouse, and tidying up outreach.
This morning, three of us went down to the Japanese Buddhist temple for drumming and chanting.
“If even monks become weary and sloppy in saluting with joined palms, then no one will perform raihai. One would no longer salute parents, children, wife and husband, neighbors or laborers with palms together.”
–Nichidatsu Fuji
Which suggests one value of Thursday’s actions. If Catholic Workers aren’t creating illegal memorial services for dead detainees in the Capitol dome, then who will perform them?
Here’s a picture of the Advent wreath we made this week. We colored white candles with melted crayons (my friend is a master at this), melted them to a piece of cardboard, put that on a tray, and covered it with evergreen branches from the tree in the backyard. I think it looks great.
We’ve been marking Advent with readings from the Henri Nouwen booklet. Today for the first time we also used the Bishops’s prayers. I was surprised to see that as part of your Advent ceremony they ask you to visit a website. Makes me feel less silly about blogging my second Sunday of Advent.
My friends have the Advent doodad pictured above in their kitchen. Day by day, you hang figures from the pegs. No idea what this is called.
61 arrested in White House demonstration against war and torture
posted by Mike on October 5th, 2009
This afternoon, an estimated 82 61 people Americans were arrested outside the White House while protesting the Obama administration’s continuation of Bush-era policies of war and indefinite detention.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that neither he nor the president were aware of the protest until it was mentioned in the daily briefing to the press, adding: “I think the president has long believed that whether your opinion is on one side of this issue or the other, that this is the greatness of our country, is that you get to amplify that opinion.”
Update: Why the inaccurate early arrest estimate? It seems that 20-odd people, the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance affinity group, approached one of the White House gates, seeking to meet with someone and discuss a letter they’d sent Obama. Nobody came out to meet them, so they had a die-in. After many minutes, it seemed they would finally be arrested, so some of them stood and sang. Members of law enforcement then shoved the group out of the area; none was arrested, though some of the organizers had assumed they would be.
General
