Message in a Bottle

A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

- Frank Herbert

The internet, and in particular the more recent explosion of blogging and the like, is frequently touted as a great equaliser, a place where we can spread our ideas freely, and so on and so forth. It is dismissed as cliché with almost equal regularity nowadays. That’s not really an argument, though. Aside from the fact that this is clearly untrue in certain more repressive regimes, aside from the fact that criticising your employer on your blog is a pretty good way of getting sacked, the idea that political freedom extends as far as being free to have a server provide a your opinions on certain matters to anyone who’s looking for it is a fairly narrow view. Certainly, it’s a step up from not being able to do that, but firing messages off into the void of cyberspace in the hope that someone might someday read them is hardly the height of political organisation. What’s really important – if anything – is the links that are made between real life and the virtual world, the solid action which must fight its way past the passive commentary and idealistic waffling.

I should perhaps have started with an introduction, to link this pseudonym into real life. I don’t feel like copying out my CV though. So for now, it’s just a name: Hello, I’m Daniel.