Bits and Pieces 9

After my disappointment with Lenny and Squeeze, I’m pleased to announce Debian Wheezy is really worth the time and trouble getting it set up. While I thought about writing up an install guide, it’s just silly to duplicate the efforts of others. You can read the official guide here. It’s not simplified, but it’s good enough. It’s not simple to install, but it’s brutally simple to keep it working once installed. I’ll be glad to help people with questions.
Debian reflects some element of the future cultural shift. It’s wide open, generic, and about as trustworthy as Open Source can be. Almost anything you really need to do can be done with it. It bears the feel of things like the Occupy movement, the Open Access future, and all the things I warn God is unleashing on this world. It’s here. You can join it or be left behind.
On Facebook the other day someone posted a link to an article about why youth are leaving evangelical churches. The writer was a bit reactionary, trying to tell churches to stop being like the Purchase Purpose Driven or emergent stuff. That’s fine, but both are wrong. The newer stuff is all wrong because it doesn’t break completely from the past, and is often nothing more than an extension of what the evangelical reactionaries were doing already. The difference is PD and emergent are more honestly mercenary, which is the hidden core of the Post-Enlightenment version of Christianity. (Anything older is more about elitism.) You see, the youth are leaving because they are leaving the old dying culture of Modern America. Even pointing to Post-Modern misses it, because it still drags too much baggage from the Modern Age. It’s Western Civilization itself that’s dying here. So the youth are leaving it all behind and the Modern American churches belong to that Modern and Post-Modern Age.
I take the same line as a lot of other Network Age thinkers. We know blowing off copyright only creates trouble while the Old Guard still have a monopoly on the use of force. So we skirt the edges. If I get a music file you want, I’ll share it directly, not in one of those notorious file-sharing setups. Or I’ll tell you how to get your own copy legally, which is much better, so you can listen to your MP3 version at will. That’s how things will be for the future, the DIY of tomorrow. But we all agree if someone produces a piece of software and refuses to maintain and support it, they have no legitimate right to keep you from using it. If you can find a copy of “obsolete” software, then find a serial key and use it, provided you can get it to run (hooray for DOSBox, FreeDOS and WINE). There are multiple communities out there keeping this stuff alive. It won’t be advertised, but if you really need it, just ask someone who knows. Sharing anonymously or between friends is the way we handle it until the Old Guard are no longer in charge.
For religion in general, and Christianity in particular, Open Source is the future. All the current structures in place, regardless where or how they started, are all aimed at control and milking us. They might believe they want good things for us, but they are so deeply deceived about the very ground on which they stand, they just don’t see how badly they are hurting everyone. Maybe it wasn’t too bad way back right after the Enlightenment, but they never stayed true to principles. Even the most democratic of churches are now so deeply mired in insider controls and systemic barriers to full participation, and utterly unaccountable, that it has to go. The youth are leaving, and the institutions will collapse, shrinking steadily, because they’ve refused to consider the intellectual assumptions on which they are built. Mysticism is a good fit for where they are going now.
Welcome to the future; it’s here.