Rearing The AMP Beast-Child
Activism, media and politics used to be very separate elements circling a nucleus called public life. No more. The shifting communications landscape has changed the nature of these three formerly separate — and elitist — elements.
Visionaries like Marshall McLuhan, Bill Gates and Nicholas Negropante all saw it coming, and they were right. A, M + P are now as entwined as the amino chains on a double helix. They are building an organism, with traits good and bad.
Those of us who work in the sphere (and, more importantly, those who don’t) have a responsibility to correctly raise this beast-child called AMP.
How will we recognize a well-raised beast-child? It will be capable of acts of partisanship, which is now, for better or worse, an established fact of at least American life. But it often will commit fast-twitch acts of selflessness, feats of goodworkisms.
Unlike do-goodery — the toothless proclamation of a town council against some act of a field general in combat, or the banning of table-salt — goodworkisms of AMP’s well-reared beast-child delivers crowd-sourced help to people who need it and deserve it. That group is… everyone.
AMP should be the child who tears down the remaining walls around the elite, from 30 Rock and Big Labor to the Bureaucrat Class. It also should build floor-to-ceiling windows, with doors forever open and lights always on. AMP should make activism more honest and create a world where the people-powered media can freely view all the acts of politics committed by the formerly privileged elite.
Once the AMP child builds that world, those of us who work in this business (and more importantly, those who do not), can pursue our advanced acts of partisanship. But at least we will know that our disagreements are not superficial but rather substantial. Then we can argue about facts, not fairy tales.
I want to help raise the AMP child because if we all see the truth about how “things get done,” we may get back to disagreeing over approaches to problems instead of wasting our time pointlessly disagreeing about something observable, testable, and concrete: the truth.
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