A Personal View
Saturday, February 17
. I'm exploring the internet when I come across a graphic with the words "24 Hours
of Democracy." It turns out this guy Dave wants to create a positive event to protest
the CDA. Essays. A huge chain. Democracy in action. Grass roots effort. Listserv to coordinate the approach. Less than a week left to do it.
Cooool. This could be fun. I can write an essay by Wednesday. So I join up.
Saturday night.
I'm thinking about this and really seeing some potential here, so I decide to write
some people on the internet involved in the arts. I really want the arts to be a
part of this. We have such a large stake. I worry about the short amount of time.
By the time I get home, it's about 4:30 in the morning, and I'm hooked.
Sunday morning.
Having read several hundred messages already, I notice a couple of questions that
aren't getting answers and a part of me wonders why no one in charge responded.
Then I realize. There is no one in charge. It's our responsibility to make it work.
Hmm... kind of like a democracy. We're not there yet, but it's looking possible.
Sunday afternoon
. People are brainstorming about names to contact. "Does anyone know how to reach
Hunter S. Thompson?" someone writes. "He'd be ideal for this." I have no idea,
but I do remember having met Timothy Leary, and after a short search, I find his
home page and drop him a line.
After a while, I start to notice some names of people in the group. Names like Dave
Winer and Mike Hutchinson who are voices of calm, encouragement and information.
Adams Douglas (who has to explain that he is not Douglas Adams). Colorful names
like baby-x, Spiderwoman, le Fantome de l'Opera, Godmoma (from Sweden) and Harley
Mom, a biker lady with four kids, Iván Cavero Belaúnde (stretching my ability to represent special characters in HTML!) and a host of other people who, like me, start to spend an inordinate amount of their lives talking on this list! I start to get to know who the hotheads are and
who has good useful ideas.
Monday afternoon.
I get a couple of messages back from people I'm trying to recruit. They think it's cool, too and will write essays.
Jeffrey, a reporter from a Dallas paper drops in to see what's going on. He sends a message
about how he doesn't see that this is really news (except maybe after-the-fact as
a brief mention) and starts a fight in the room. A number of angry messages about
the media start taking up space, until Dave and some others get a bit testy and tell people
to put their arguments in their essays, and not in our group -- we've got a lot of
work to do, and can't afford to get distracted.
We're still trying to work out all the technical details of the project as well as
hold the hands of some of the new people who haven't bothered to read all the information
at the main site.
Tuesday morning.
Emma becomes the poster child of the project. She's an adorable little girl in
a small black-and-white photo accompanying this simple essay:
For Emma
I had a part in bringing you into this world. I'll make sure they don't strip you
of your freedoms before you have a chance and the right to fight for them yourself.
Dad
Dave puts the picture on the front page of "24 hours" This essay becomes a rallying
cry for the project, and one of the most-quoted in early news stories.
Tuesday afternoon.
AOL puts out a statement in support of the project: "Governments around
the world are attempting to regulate the gloriously chaotic atmosphere of the Internet
using legislation. 24 Hours of Democracy is a response to this impending threat,
a non-commercial and non-partisan celebration of the freedoms that cyberspace offers."
Dave puts up a "24 Hours Tour" of selected sites that are involved in the project
which he found interesting. I'm dissapointed at the lack of arts sites.
Tuesday evening.
I decide to try to find some advance essays related to the arts and come up with
the idea of putting together a page that links to any arts-related essays. Dave
says "Go for it," and I begin to put together a page of links with short reviews.
"Harley Mom" sends an email to a friend that accidentally goes to the entire list.
Her son Grant passed away today. The room goes quiet. After a pause, a simple
message comes from one of the group "We're with you, Harley Mom."
The group has
become a family. Harley Mom and her daughter both continue to post their freedom essays. It's
therapy of a sort. Later, a memorial to Grant becomes part of the project.
Wednesday morning.
I get my "24 Hours Fine Arts Tour" up and running and let people know about it.
Wednesday evening.
Dave lets us know that Bill Gates is writing an essay. An electronic
cheer goes up -- everyone knows that Gates' essay will be news and add to the visibility
of the project. A few grumbles as well from people who don't like him, but spirits are definitely lifted.
The Fine Arts Tour is highlighted on the 24 Hours pages. Very cool! I start getting
lots more requests from people to check out their work for inclusion in the list.
It's becoming a full time job (along with my real full-time job) and I'm getting
3 hours of sleep a night.
Late Wednesday night.
The tension is amazing. Midnight Pacific time (2 am Central) is the beginning of
the 24 hours. At that time, we can start sending in the registration of our essay
pages. I get some more essays to add from students here.
Thursday morning. 1 am Central time.
It doesn't matter. We can send them in anytime on Thursday, yet no one seems to want
to go home. How can we miss the historic moment? Discussions start to get punchy
as people wait for the magic time.
2:07 am Central.
I send in the registration for my essay. The information indicated that it would
be a few minutes before I received the code to insert in my page which would set
the links to the previous and next pages.
3:00 am Central.
No response yet. Panic starts to fill the room. Message after message wondering
what's happened. No answer. Finally a message of calm from someone -- "Relax.
This has never been done before. There's bound to be a few bugs. They'll get it
worked out." We're all tired and desperately want it to work.
3:45 am.
I finally go home. I've got a meeting at work to attend in a few hours.
Thursday noon.
They still are working out the bugs, but it looks like things will be under control
shortly. In fact, in the early afternoon, people start receiving their code information.
Thursday afternoon
. The most frenzied work I've ever seen. It's like someone decided to build a city
in a day. People getting their link information installed on their pages. Last
minute essays being gathered and posted. Various technical problems cropping up
and being solved.
And then something amazing happened.
We discovered that we have neighbors.
As we put in our "Next" and "Previous" links, those actually took us to essays by
other people somewhere in the world. We read those essays and got to know our neighbors,
dropped them a line and introduced themselves. It was the electronic equivalent
to bringing over a cake. And there were neighbors on the other side of our neighbors.
Those links were like laying sidewalk between homes. And of course we checked to
make sure our neighbors links properly led to us. Nobody wanted to be out of the
chain or at the end of a cul-de-sac. Helpful neighbors gave advice to those having
trouble setting up their links. Others got impatient and started laying sidewalk to the next
person in the chain.
Thursday night.
The room starts getting an air of excitement. It's working! It looks like we may
have close to a thousand essays in the chain. Some people write to say how much
they love their neighbors. I've already met some of mine. On one side I have J. Watkins, who loves some of the same books I do, and Gregg Stephan who is an art photographer.
On the other side is "godmoma" from Sweden. One of my students' neighbors include
Avedon Carol from London with Feminists Against Censorship, and Bill Humphries from
Madison, WI who I like right away. Another student of mine is next to Willy, a Native
American from El Paso, Texas as part of the Privatel pages that Crispy (Chris Coen) maintains.
We're truly becoming a community. People from all over the world are neighbors in
"24 Hours of Democracy." They're working together to improve their community and
to make it work.
It's not all comfy. A few fights break out between neighbors, and others step in
to try to calm them down. After all, there's a whole lot of diversity here from
the radical left to the radical right and everything in between. The one thing they
agree upon is that their ability to express themselves freely is essential.
Friday. 2 am.
The registration process ends. The number is just under 1,000. Now the robots get
to work sniffing through each page and indexing them, so that by Friday afternoon,
you can do a search on any word and find the essay.
More tours develop and people start exploring the new city. The initial vision of
a single chain of all the essays evolves into something else entirely. Some were
impatient and sent in their registration twice or three times as they waited for
their code, so they got multiple sets of links. They became intersections where you could choose
a direction. There were dead-ends, but often those got routed around somewhere else.
Someone called it more like macrome instead of a chain. I think it looks a lot
like democracy.
The essays are amazing. Sure there are some lame ones, but there are breathtakingly
beautiful words and images about freedom. There's high comedy, and amazing high-tech
animations, graphics and sounds. The main page includes the ability to jump randomly through town as well as walking down the street, and you start seeing the essays
of old friends you met on the discussion group and so many more.
There are people from Brazil, Peru, Ireland, Canada, Spain (in Spanish), Australia, England, Japan, Germany,
Sweden, and many other places in our town. Philip from South Africa writes:
"We in South Africa are in the midst of the process of writing a Constitution and
a Bill of Human Rights. Entrenched in this is the Freedom of Speech. What does this
mean? In short : The freedom to say what you think and to express your ideas. This
is a new concept to most South Africans. For many years we could not do this without fear
drawing some rather nasty official attention."
This is humbling.
Probably the most concise statement comes from Illinois State University student Melissa
Basco:
"To express myself in a free artistic way, is to live, grow, and learn"
Saturday.
The room gets a little quieter as some of us catch up on sleep, although many others
are still working hard. There's only 108 messages waiting for me when I come in
this afternoon. Most people are still exploring the town.
We were protective of the internet and the future promise that it held for us. We'll
be even more so, now that we live there.
More features pop up, and other technical elements are being fixed. People are talking
about turning this into a book, or a CD-ROM. Other ideas come up to make this a
continuing community and start letting in other residents. There's a lot more work
to be done.
CNN mentions the event and various papers start covering it. We'd like more, but
it's a start.
It's a movement.
It's a celebration of freedom.
It's democracy.
This is the freedom of expression which we must protect at all costs.
Essay written by Peter Guither, General Manager of the Illinois Shakespeare Festival and Illinois State Theatre as well as a fine art photographer.
You can reach me at: pete@thelivingcanvas.com
