Here’s another excerpt from the letter I just quoted from John Perry Barlow.
This really hit home, because I feel like I’m one of those people who got woken up last year.
I think more people are waking up every day.
Maybe we can even wake up some of the possums.

Actually, I have finally figured out what’s going on with a great many of us. Shocked into a kind of political catatonia by the multitudinous Uh-Oh’s of the Uh-Oh’s, we are pretending to be asleep. This is the only explanation I can think of for our political passivity.
If we were actually asleep, we would have been shocked into alertness by the wanton ruin of our economy in only two years, the overnight establishment of an oligarchy that makes Mexico’s look enlightened, the detailed repudiation of the Constitution enacted by the USA PATRIOT Act, and the breezy willingness of our government to commit us to simultaneous wars in separate hemispheres.
If we had really been sleeping, these and many other shocks to the conscience would have us bolt upright by now. The real patriots would be well out of bed, rushing to defend America against the Junta, rather than ratifying it with their absence from the polls.
But there is an old Navajo proverb you’ve heard me quote before: “It’s impossible to awaken someone who is pretending to be asleep.” Never has that phrase seemed more bitterly and poignantly true than now. It is also impossible to teach someone who’s pretending to be asleep. And, finally it is impossible to administer a pop quiz to possum players.

Danny O’Brien was kind enough to send me this charming essay about Ben Franklin written by Mark Twain:
The Late Benjamin Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin did a great many notable things for his country, and made her young name to be honored in many lands as the mother of such a son. It is not the idea of this memoir to ignore that or cover it up. No; the simple idea of it is to snub those pretentious maxims of his, which he worked up with a great show of originality out of truisms that had become wearisome platitudes as early as the dispersion from Babel; and also to snub his stove, and his military inspirations, his unseemly endeavor to make himself conspicuous when he entered Philadelphia, and his flying his kite and fooling away his time in all sorts of such ways, when he ought have been foraging for soap-fat, or constructing candles… It is time these gentlemen were finding out that these execrable eccentricities of instinct and conduct are only the evidences of genius, not the creators of it.

I sure like the idea of thinking of Benjamin Franklin as a hacker. And a patriotic hacker at that! (Like most of us, I imagine.)

Franklin was a socially and politically effective hacker who created the leading edge of science, technology, and society. He was responsible for breakthroughs like lighting=electricity, and inventions like bifocals and the Franklin stove. His printing operation was the 18th century equivalent of the web (the number of newspapers in the colonies expanded from a couple of dozen to a few hundred during his life, and he funded the creation of several of them).