The process for political change

1: Advocate for the least worst options at the city, county, state, and national level, even if that means convincing someone you like to run and helping them get on the ballot

2: Vote for the least worst options at all levels

3: Watch as the least worst option gets a little better with each cycle

This has been broken for the last 40 years or so because people keep saying “bluh bluh, all politicians are the same” instead of working to change things. It will only get worse if you refuse to take action.

I still haven’t decided whether this is actually a problem. It feels like one. It seems weird to rely on an aggregator’s semiautomatic summary and not the sites themselves. What happens if any of the aggregators finds itself taken over by voting mobs like Digg was? You would only see the stories a special interest wanted you to see.

And some things are just plain tapped out. You might squeeze more life out of an old subject, but it’s rarely worth the time. It’s why I couldn’t make the blogging blog thing work. All the ideas I had were repeating themselves or contrived to the point of uselessness.

1. Blogs are a platform, not a business model

It’s one of those stories that repeats through history to the shock of those who live through it. Police get better body armor, criminals get better bullets, and so on. It’s always a good idea to assume your opponent will take your technology and use it against you.

Pirates of centuries past used the ships, weapons, and other technology of those they targeted, and it’s not much different today. This is true whether you’re talking about piracy on the high seas or network security.

There is no white. There is no black. There are only hues of gray. To think any different is to subscribe to discrimination – to believe one way or the other is to be ineffectively forced into a mindset without appropriate judgement of another.

This post is not about white or black. That subject is dead (like SEO). This post is about this or that. Yes or no. Right or wrong. Rarely do these answers exist eplicitly to us – rarely are they imparted to us correctly in the form of outside opinion.

There are various molds of SEO, and because of that, one situation or the next will inform inherent biases, strengths, and weaknesses that should be used descriminately to analyze every tweet – every blog post – and every piece of advice you receive. Very often what you perceive as this or that – white or black – is because it’s good for them. It’s because their situation has informed that dichtomized view that informs that this is right. That isn’t. Do this. Not that.

There is a “heaven and hell” view of the SEO world that is informed by the institutional structure of its advice. Most of what you hear is purely described as “white hat” by the people with the biggest audiences. And because they have the biggest audiences, they are forced to sticking there. And perhaps they got there because they’re “white hat”. Or perhaps they have the liberty to use white hat because they have the biggest brands because they’re in front of everyone because they speak white hat. Or perhaps they got the biggest brands because they’re white hat, and the biggest brands affinity for white hat got them the biggest audience.

I think the white/black dichotomy reflects the myopia that’s all over the SEO world. There’s rarely a case where one thing or another is right for everyone. It’s true for diets, exercise routines, operating systems, and programming languages too.

You’ll even find the same myopia running around in just about any domain of knowledge. People still go on about which command line editor is objectively superior.

This is the lost art of searching the web. Back before Google’s PageRank, we had to find stuff based on things we had already found. Directories helped, but only if you knew what you were looking for. All search engine spiders did was automate this process. And with marketers increasingly taking over SERPs, we’ll have to rely on this ancient technique until engineers find a way to defeat human ingenuity.

Not that I mind this way of finding stuff.

And it died. TechTV died before G4 bought it up and tore it apart, but the purchase and gutting helped the globally connected community of geeks move on. And move on we did–it was a renaissance of design, interactivity, and technology.

The channel was good fun to watch, but it didn’t leave much of a void with things like YouTube, Revision3, and Penny Arcade TV following in the wake of its death. Sometimes death is essential for progress. Old ideas die with their supporters and their mediums to make space for fresh takes and new channels for getting ideas out.

And we’re about due for another renaissance.

Most people mean the Linux ecosystem when they say Linux. That’s a normal evolution of language: a word for something specific becomes a more general term. “Linux” is easy to say and easy to remember, so it became the standard term.

Fighting against a logical and useful evolution of language is always a losing battle. One can drill down with qualifiers (Linux kernel, Linux boot loader, Linux DE, etc) if they’re one of the tiny minority who mean the kernel when they say Linux.

The rest of us will proceed happily along meaning the ecosystem of applications, tools, and people when we say Linux.