I agree that having social media pissing matches with ignorant people raises awareness, but things fall flat when it comes to organizing people to create change.

For example, I was in Zuccotti Park the day before the Occupy Wall Street sitting protest was finally disbanded in downtown Manhattan. When I got there, it was a disorganized carnival, with all kinds of disparate messages: “save our country”, “save the whales”, “corporations are evil”, and a whole bunch of screaming and guitars and lots of drug addicts living in fetid tents. I started chatting with a New York Times reporter who walked up to me because I appeared to be the only person in the group who had showered in the past week. She had been covering the event since its inception and she said at first it was reasonably organized and had in attendance a wide variety of folks. But after a few weeks, the organizers had to move on and people had to go back to work and their families. So some of the remaining folks had to post on Craig’s List to get people to come and sit…and the unemployed and homeless showed up. I don’t have anything against such folks, but you can probably infer that it became incredibly disorganized. The vast majority of people don’t have the time to do the hard work to affect change. So what came of it? Well it did raise the awareness and inspire other people. But how much closer to real change did we actually get? I don’t know, do you?

I just finished reading a book about Facebook “An Ugly Truth”. The folks running Facebook aren’t evil, they are just focused on growth and not pissing off half of their audience. Change requires extreme organization and resources. Most of us are busy working and/or caring for our families. Who has the time, organizational skills, resources, contacts, and staying power to go against the money machine? A few billionaires like Tom Steyer? That’s not even enough. We need a new model to organize. Probably needs to involve a lot of young people who have the time and motivation (they will live with climate change more than us), combined with the wisdom and financial resources of older folks. But how? Beats me.