Anil Dash’s response to Malcolm Gladwell’s thorough takedown of social media as a revolution-facilitating infrastructure begins with a great point:

There are revolutions, actual political and legal revolutions, that are being led online. They’re just happening in new ways, and taking subtle forms unrecognizable to those who still want a revolution to look like they did in 1965.

But then the piece moves to its main idea, that these otherwise unrecognizable revolutions are those which have been putting dents in the hull of the Western copyright regime:

We have had an enormous and concerted act of social disobedience play out over the past half-decade, where millions have decided that the present regime of intellectual property law and corporate control over the way we communicate is no longer tenable. So, every day, with the click of a button, people from all walks of life are ignoring the law and protesting in public, simply by uploading content to YouTube or Facebook or anywhere else.

He then goes on to discuss the extent of this as manifested in the Maker Faire, which sort of rubs me weirdly.  Dash is a self-proclaimed “evangelist” of social media, so it’s not shocking at all that he’d locate the real revolution in the realm of culture hacking, DIY, BoingBoing-esque steampunk stuff.  Don’t get me wrong: all that stuff is well and good, and I’m endlessly jealous of the capabilities of this type of creative personality.

But wait: This is a revolution?  This is the modern-day example to the Civil Rights Movement? “Use What You Have: The Accessible Playstation 3”? “Toy Knitting Tricks”? (I may or may not have selected the most dorky-sounding ones for dramatic emphasis)

Perhaps I don’t know Dash’s work well enough, and others who do might read his post and say “of course, that’s what Dash would say—in fact, that’s eminently Dashian.”  But, and this is probably me speaking out of turn, I don’t think that the people really in need of drastic help, civil rights, or “change” in this country are worried much about copyright law, or developing their own creativity by making their own hedgehog plushie instead of buying one from the dollar store and then figuring out how to get their water turned back on.

I don’t think Dash is wrong, or that the “return to DIY” is a bad thing, by any stretch (at times, I do think locating political protest in Western cultural products is misguided and subject to easy decontextualization).  The stretch here is calling Web 2.0’s facilitation of hacker culture a “revolution,” and not “something that middle-class people with lots of spare time on their hands and a healthy disregard for corporations do.”

If this is what we have, is there any question at all why progressives can’t get their shit together and actually effect any real change other than making a cigar-box guitar?

Rhetorical question which is maybe too mean: is making DIY stuff and “embracing one’s inner media producer” any different, and will it effect as little real change, as John and Yoko’s literally lazy-ass, rich person’s remediation of the sit-ins in the late 60s?