We can consume anything from any age: we can dress however we like, listen to music from any age, and read whatever we please. For lunch: fourty-nine dolmas, all-you-can-eat dim sum, and eighty tacos al pastor, all out of a taco truck at 3am on Mission Street in San Francisco.
And we are empowered! We are knowledgable! We are unstoppable!
We can make anything we need to use, retrieve anything we need to know, and share everything that needs to be talked about:
like Tahrir Square in Egypt
like the quad at UC Davis
like Sproul Hall at UC Berkeley
like Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland
like Zuccotti Park in New York
like 14th Street
like Wall Street
like all streets
The future is now! The future is here!
Step right up! There's an amazing selection of technological tools at your disposal. (Brought to you by slave labor and environmental devastation in China.)
Step right up! There's a just-as-amazing parade of paradoxes to gawk at:
We’re free as consumers, but not as citizens. (Just ask Ben and Jerry if they can get married.)
We’re free to consume, but not to create. (Just ask a tagger whose name isn't Banksy.)
We’re free to be schooled, but not to be educated. (Just last spring, I took a trip to hike the north rim of the achievement gap.)
Once upon a time, the fairy tale ended without a "happily ever after" when we realized that a far larger power laid claim to the land beneath your feet, and didn’t want you to dance on it anymore.
There can be no rebellion, only an inexorable march toward those virtues which have made all that’s right in the world: education, fraternity, liberty, respect, art, beauty, nature. These are the light and the light can be seen by anyone who has eyes. That’s where I come in.
This is a manifesto, my manifesto.
I write this in peace, for peace. Yet I take up arms against the forces of darkness and I surrender my weapons only to the God. My mission is to bring light through education. I am only one man, and I cannot do battle against the entire forces of darkness, but what I will is to share my light among others, some of whom will in turn share theirs. I may not be around to see the end result, but I will die in peace with the assurance that I answered the call to arms and charged into Battle, making the world brighter with every step.
This is the future, our future!
The fool looks at the finger when it is pointed at the moon. Our technology is a finger and it points to knowledge and inter-connectedness. It points to wonder, intelligent organization, and an underlying order to seemingly random chaos. We must not, must not, must not become entranced by this magic mirror lest we become dazed and fall in love with ourselves. It is a portal to a part of our world we are just beginning to understand, the world created by our mind.
We begin to understand that this is *our* world. It belongs to all of us. We have the tools we need to advance society on our own. We have the power in our hands, and we're ready for the responsibility to determine our own destiny. We've proven that the media is us, and that we are the media. We've shown that the government is us, and that we are the government. We're showing that we no longer need to consent to be governed because *we* can govern.
This is our future.
This is our future.
