11/23/2003: 
Breaking News
Article#3: The workers must control the means of media production!
THOMAS PAINE
This site has been up for less than two weeks, but I know we're onto something here. The Athenaeum is coalsecing into the website we always pictured in our minds. All we have to do is deliver the goods. This isn't some dumbass blog where you're gonna find what we ate for breakfast. If you need to obsessively watch a life unfold, use your eyes.
There is a method to our madness. Although we the editors are still finding our look and our ground rules, one thing has shone through- the quality of our posts. Each of us have been going around for months saying, "If I had a website, I would..."
-awiggins has a zest for exposing the criminally absurd,
-prof_booty, waiting for the robots to come, watches out for the technological advances that will precede them,
& I was awestruck that no media outlet had put together the pieces in Nauru.
What I am getting at is the Athenaeum has potential. We are covering serious stories while still being able to believe in the possibility of discovering Atlantis. All we are using is our brains and our computers which double as DVD- printing presses and film studios that have a potential audience larger than any broadcast television station.
People like to whine about how the evil (insert direction) -wing media is trying to silence dissent through consolidation and mergers. And you know what? There is absolutely no excuse, if you feel your viewpoint is not being represented, not to create your own media outlet. Imagine how much courage it took for Thomas Paine to take his copy of Common Sense to a print shop during the Revolution. Writing, copying, and distributing inflammatory material involved possible incarceration and death.
We have so much power, freedom, and potential available to us and all we can think of doing with it is downloading porn. If it is possible for people like us to have computers, then they are available to all workers who wish to have one. The workers must control the means of media production. I refuse to go back to a time when there were only four television networks (government- owned PBS included). Talk about fucking mind control! Right now, the internet is one huge public access station, and if we are not careful , we could have that same top- down control of information again. If you think you're drowning in an ocean of sensationalistic tabloid shit, then you have to create your own island!
