Quotes from The Next Renaissance, A talk by Douglas Rushkoff

I am not a programmer. I thought maybe blogging would suffice in doing my part to change the world, – that has been, and still is, the distant goal of my blogging endeavor.

Computers and networks finally offer us the ability to write. And we do write with them. Everyone is a blogger, now. Citizen bloggers and YouTubers who believe we have now embraced a new “personal” democracy. Personal, because we can sit safely at home with our laptops and type our way to freedom.

But reading further in this piece in a recent Edge edition made me realize that to truly make an impact, knowing some molecular biology and writing about it, will not cut it.

But writing is not the capability being offered us by these tools at all. The capability is programming—which almost none of us really know how to do. We simply use the programs that have been made for us, and enter our blog text in the appropriate box on the screen. Nothing against the strides made by citizen bloggers and journalists, but big deal. Let them eat blog.

At the very least on a metaphorical level, the opportunity here is not to write about politics or—more likely—comment on what someone else has said about politics. The opportunity, however, is to rewrite the very rules by which democracy is implemented. The opportunity of a renaissance in programming is to reconfigure the process through which democracy occurs.

Since for the time being I do not have the time or the money to educate myself a second time around, blogging will have to do. And I still believe there’s some impact in that (maybe not in my blogging, but there’s without a doubt power in the blogosphere as a whole).

At some point however, since true future power apparently lies in programming, – off to school again, in a mission to rule the world.