project PM

I like your reference to Plato being a Fascist. I read The Republic at a time when i was just awakening politically. (I might explain here that I was born into poverty and had to educate myself, I will not describe circumstances in order to avoid what could be construed as self-pity or false modesty, what have you). I have necessarily had to observe the educated middle-classes from a somewhat low vantage point but mostly with admiration for those few of you that did not just accept the world as given to you by your parents and professors. Reading and music have been the great succour in my life being a part of the underclass, (thank heaven for Dylan, Morrison, Lennon, Chomsky, Hedges and Mary Jane et al). The thing that really struck me about the Republic that Plato was formulating is his total acceptance of the slave-class as a given. Being a member of that (somewhat reformulated) body of people i had to stop and question everything i had heard from the great orators that had preached freedom throughout my youth.

But i want to say a word about that most maligned of web presences, Facebook. Most of my family and friends use this and Utube plus Google as their main, if not only interaction with the Internet. Yes there are inanities in profusion, political awareness is perfunctory to non-existent, but we keep in touch on an uncommonly, for the lower classes, constant basis. I can also say, hand on my plebian socialist heart, that i have rarely, if ever, encountered nastiness on the scale seen in posts to the more erudite platforms of communication. They are there in their millions, and they wait for guidance. Completely deprived of the educational tools you take for granted, along with the social pressures exerted by their daily struggle just to exist, they cannot comprehend the threat posed to us by SOPA, PIPA and ACTA. The day is coming when large swathes of us will be disconnected from or prevented from ever joining the internet community, just like an unemployed worker becomes overnight a non-person, unable to get even a basic bank account. We will be kept out by the thumb-scanning technologies that are in store for us.

Facebook has the capacity to reach these people but this is mainly being achieved by advertisers and "game" purveyors who prey on their unwitting boredom and frustrations. Surely there is room in the considerations of your august body of founder members for the development of some kind of benign obtrusion into their facebook lives with the object of surreptitious enlightenment? I try my best by posting links to more esoteric sites that might initially tittilate or intrigue them and hope that they follow other links once there, but this is necessarily hit-and-miss.

You need fresh troops for your 'revolution', they are all there and they are (mostly) beautiful and kind. You talk about duty, I think this is one of the first duties of the middle/educated classes. I wish I could have made a more coherent argument here and maybe come up with some suggestions...sorry but from where I stand I can only see the gaps.