Doc Searls had a dream about what happens when nobody objects:
… I lay in bed for a long time thinking about what the dream meant. What bothered me about the dream wasn’t that a bomb had gone off, but that I had been in a position to stop it and didn’t. The problem wasn’t the bomb, I realized, or the willingness of somebody to use it; but that I had been passive about it. So had everybody else, I realized. It was like we were all watching a TV show.
Passivism, I realized, is the sickness. And its cure is activism. …
[In the Sixties,] the institutions of industry and government seemed far more vast and solid than they do today. They seemed connected only to themselves and others of their kind.
It’s different now. Large institutions today – church, business, goverment, education, law enforcement, the courts (and crime as well) – are not just connected by the Net, but rely on its open, free and increasingly capable infrastructure. Activism can now be very direct and personal. The threshold of engagement, of organization, of raising and spending funds, is so low it has become negligible for all but the very poor.
Its enemy is passivism, which is maintained by manufactured entertainment, consumed on a massive scale by citizens of civilized countries around the world. The result is stupidity on a grand scale.
Link via Jon Lebkowsky.