I am just back from
CCC, where I got reminded of the cyber-libertarianism... And I bought a book, "Barefoot in Cyberspace". There's a quote there I find extremely relevant for me nowadays:
The youth caucus proposed taking the money to build another conference centre
that could be run more sustainably. [...] But when the youth caucus submitted
their proposal to the Grindstone Co-op adults, it was met with a cold scepticism
Cory finds hard to bear even now.
“Grindstone had been started by Quakers who ran everything on a consensus basis,” says Cory,
“But you can’t incorporate a consensus organisation. The by-laws had to have a basis
for overcoming deadlocks. And so we had one – it was a majority vote of shares – but
we had never really used it before.” It was this system that was used to decide the issue,
and the youth caucus lost out. “It just flew in the face of the history of consensus,” Cory laments.
Although the youth wing received some of the grant money, which kept them going
for a few more years, they eventually petered out. Cory is less than circumspect.
“We might have petered out anyway but that was a real kind of angry activist split
in my life where I felt like these people, who had said to us: ‘Our mission is
to turn you into our successors and we recognise that young people have the capacity
to do anything in the world,’ had then said: ‘Actually, that was just bullshit.
Young people can’t really do anything, you know. Young people are just kids.
You guys are just kids.’”
http://barefootintocyberspace.com/book/hypertext/