Talk is cheap.

As we watch politicians and journalists scramble to gather the best
collection of soundbites, cyber-pundits vying against lobbyists and
legislation, remember...

Talk is cheap. Today that is literally true.

"Maybe the Beat Generation...is just another step toward that last, pale
generation, which will not know the answer either," Jack Kerouac wrote. But
through a near-mystical set of inherited technologies, we come together. We
share minutia, state our opinions--simply because we want to.

As words like mankind and democracy echo through elementary schools,
thousands silently discover access to each other. High school students and
college students; people of all ages. Poets, activists, seers and
cranks--and ordinary, uncredentialed humans with the freedom to speak.

And to speak out. Against anything they want.

Injustice.

The weather.

Big corporations.

The government.

Big corporations who lobby the government.

If democracy moves unseen through the small town public libraries and a
hundred thousand newsstands, it also animates the wild-eyed scribbler
passing out home-made magazines. A fiery animal instinct draws us. The
imperatives we hear from a potential global audience, the crazy music, the
pull of the others...

We don't need a fancy word like "electronic publishing".

Journalists watch us. Advertisers descend. Corporations court us. Salesmen
walk among us.

And we wonder when our Congressmen will get e-mail addresses.

The great equalizer allows any fool to launch a wild, headlong tackle.
Against a machine, or a corporation, or an injustice.

Many of my friends mock America Online. To them, corporate sponsorship of
this event is an obscenity--a PR-mongering ogre piggy-backing on a genuine
human concern.

On the very day "24 Hours of Democracy" is displaying their corporate logo,
a teenager will be told their words violate the "TERMS OF SERVICE". And
their access to participatory democracy will be revoked.

My friends will tell you that...

The tools to participate in "democracy" do not cost $3.00 an hour.

They do not come with a corporate logo.

They do not require a demographics survey.

For the last two years, my friends have spoken out against America Online.

Loud and long and clear.

That's what democracy means to me.

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