I am reading Cory Doctorow’s Makers, which, in the version I’m reading, carries a preface about copyright.

In case you don’t know who Doctorow is: he’s a sci-fi author, anti-absolute-copyright activist, and general left-wing complainer, possibly not in that order. He’s originally from Canada and now lives in the UK; as with pretty much all such people, this gives him a special insight as to everything that’s wrong with the United States.

Doctorow’s main issue is copyright, or, more specifically, absolute copyright. Himself, he gives away all (most?) of his writing via his website while at the same time selling the stuff through normal channels. His intention is to be a one-man experiment to prove whether it’s possible to make money from intellectual property without hiring a team of lawyers to sue your fans. So far, it seems to be working.

In the course of explaining why he does this — he quotes Tim O’Reilly in saying that his, and most writers’ — biggest problem isn’t piracy but obscurity — he writes

I have always dreamt of writing sf novels, since I was six years old. Now I do it. It is a goddamned dream come true, like growing up to be a cowboy or an astronaut, except that you don’t get oppressed by ranchers or stuck on the launchpad in an adult diaper for 28 hours at a stretch.

First: astronauts do not spend 28 hours on the launch pad under any circumstances.

Second: note here that he uses cowboys as an example of people who are oppressed. Now, I’m sure that there were and are some bad cowboy jobs. But to see a cowboy — the very symbol of independence and self-determination — as oppressed takes a special kind of view of the world.

And I’ll be forever indebted to Cory Doctorow for illustrating this so perfectly, because his illustration has allowed me to put words to a concept that’s been annoying me for a while.

The activist’s credo is: everyone’s fucked but me.

The argument goes something like this: Things are just fine for me, but everyone else is getting the short end of the stick, and so it is up to me and other similarly comfortable people to fix all of this for them. In many cases, you can add to that: because they are all too stupid to see the truth.

This is why I can respect Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, the Tea Party people, etc., but find ACORN and WTO ‘protests’ disgusting. There’s a big difference between a group of people looking out for itself, making its opinions known, and attempting to influence the government or the culture so that its members will be better off on the one hand, and organizations of the Professionally Outraged, abstractly arguing the cases of other, usually unseen people on the other.

The logical conclusion of this way of thinking is that People in general either

1. do not know enough to run their own lives (search for ‘voting against self interest‘ for many examples) or
2. the real majority supports X, even though the most accurate measures seem to indicate that people support Y.

Either one in the end justifies autocratic rule by a ‘benevolent’ dictator, and the best part is that you don’t actually have to demonstrate that people are hungry/oppressed/being shipped to Gitmo/whatever: you just assert that they are from your perch of middle-class comfort.