What is a writer?

Writers have suffered, ever since time began. If we look at china today, and the former soviet union, yesterday - one sees societies which are throwbacks to a different time in history. Governments lock down on ideas in those societies.

In our history - of course we have Galileo... Oscar Wilde... John Bunyan... Socrates.

Also we have had a lack of development of technology which allows writers to make a living - no one developed one book at a time printing presses.. Instead, until very recently, publishers printed thousands of books on big presses... and then of course, there's no way to keep a proper profit margin as a writer... because you have to sell books to get out of debt.

So what has been our answer? We always do broad agendas. Literacy campaigns - mandatory public education, where kids learn how to read and write. The development of the internet - where everybody can have a web page or blog and publish their work for a world audience for free.

We know that writing is about ideas... and ideas are thought... and thought is what can save our society.

In some sense, you could say that our only goal is our own obsolescence.

We are not like other guilds. We do not try to make money... there never has been money in teaching. There is certainly no short term future for making money when everybody is giving their wares away for free on the internet, as bloggers. However, in the long term, there is certainly a lot more ecomonic possibility for writers if society as a whole is more literate.

But besides our own lives - the good of the world is at stake. Thought is ideas, Ideas are life. We have to press forward vigorously with our agenda of teaching people the value of critical thought. People have to become mature enough to see through the mistakes of their own society. They have to be able to question the conceptions their society holds about how the world works.

So why do we as a guild, not have our act together? Because historically, we've had two big problems - our biggest one is governments. Writers are thinkers. And thinkers have to think critically and in depth about every topic under the sun - things taboo, things negative, about the misguided actions of politicians.

One is not a thinker, unless one has thought about these things. Governments have long had the policy of imprisoning and executing writers for thinking too far outside the lines. It happens today in China, still.

Secondly, we have had the technological problem... at the same time they were automating the farm, and making things easier and easier for agricultural production... they were making bigger and bigger printing presses and no one made small ones. I think that this course was taken in past centuries, because of a government and an elite, who still wanted to have some element of control - with a centralized process, reigns could be pulled. It's like the media ownership laws, today. The republicans relax media ownership laws, in order to concentrate power, so that they might be able to pull strings when and if they choose to, at a future date.

Thankfully, as of this first decade of the new century, we as writers have come to a place where we can stand, comfortably. Mandatory education has been in place through several cultural changes. And this is a status quo thing. The internet is free. It has been built from the ground up, in a way which guarantees freedom of speech. Anonymity is guaranteed today. It may or may not be guaranteed in future decades, with IPv6 coming in. But anonymity is central to the current internet... and there has been some good precedent set for the internet's future, now, in it's inceptual years.

Certainly, it costs no money to post your thoughts for a world audience to see, and I can't see this changing in the future.

So, we have achieved book-literacy in our ethnically european countries, and we have succeeded in decentralizing text, audio and video media. (In regards to video - there is no way that HDTV will ever be able to compete with video over the internet, once the speed of our internet in the usa comes up to world standards.)