...the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced that it’s considering using social media to track and surveil its own population. DHS Undersecretary Caryn Wagner said that the government fears social unrest like that seen in Tunisia last December and wants to use social media services like Twitter to monitor its own population. Last January, Senators Lieberman and Collins renewed calls to give the president a kill switch over the internet to protect the government in times of emergency, a call echoed by Senator McCain last July.
in the time remaining, to help us understand how the man-made system of capitalism will lead to the extinction of our human species, and so many others.
We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up