I've always been lucky, career-wise. No idea why.

When I was growing up, I was always good with computers -- but I never wanted to work in the computer industry. All through high school I was excited to be a TV tech. Maybe eventually I'd work my way up to directing. Man, I really miss that sometimes.

I didn't really do college. I tried for a while, but the local community college was teaching me stuff that I already knew was outdated and wouldn't help me get a better job.

By the time I was 20, I was working as the Playback Supervisor for Montgomery Community Television, which operated some local origination programming, public access, and the county government stuff on three cable channels. Basically, I was a glorified robotic tape arm, and I also supervised some other folks who did the same thing. I was earning just over $20K.

In my spare time, though, I was playing with the Internet. This was 93-94, so the 'net was still mostly non-commercial.

One day I got a call from my ISP. It seems I'd left a script running, and it got crazy and pegged the CPU. I apologized and tried to fix it. Two weeks later I got a call back saying it wasn't fixed. The next day they offered me a job.

For those who have forgotten, this mailing list list is and has always been the Sushi Cabal. We are the Bay Area incarnation of a semi-mythical group that gets together over sushi and, if we actually existed, would decide the fate of the Internet.

In other words, we're here to eat sushi and kick ass.

Sure, these days the Internet looks like it was planned at Taco Bell. It's arguable that we're all out of ass. But that's no reason to just give up! We're not the pasteurized process shit food cabal, we're the SUSHI CABAL! The not-sushi cabal is way over there on the right, sandwiched between the Menudo fan club and the First Amalgamated e-Church of MyWhining iHosebags.

The recent tenor of this list, even while choosing restaraunts, has been less palatable than Nestle's Strawberry Quik made with week-old bongwater. It has been a depressing reminder of all that is wrong with this world. It needs to stop.

So like, roll that in your futomaki and dip it.

Thank you, I be here all the week.

Societal change has always been slow; as Steve's original post intimated, it's really only sudden disasters that can foster faster change in a society, and even then there were probably many decades of displaced Minoans before the Acheans began to be a recognizably different society.

Some years ago I read an article (I don't remember where) that drew a fairly clear path from the McCarthy hearings through the free speech movement (amond other things) in the sixies to the materialist backlash in the eighties (come to think of it, it probably looked a lot like Jim's graph) and what was then the slow growth of uncensorable real-time global communications of the Internet.

Of course, this was back when terms like "uncensorable real-time global communications" were all the rage -- truth is, as the incumbent society gets online we've got our own displaced Minoans to deal with, and no major disaster to shake 'em into realizing that change is afoot.