I’m reading Charles Leadbeater on Ilich and public services, and just¬†found this paragraph:

¬†”the role of professionals in future would be to act as persuaders, counsellors and campaigners, not delivering a service, but encouraging people to acquire the skills to look after themselves more effectively. Such professionals would almost have be like molecules in the bloodstream of society, rather than waiting in their institutionalised boxes for the public to present their problems.”¬†¬†¬†

In the popular imagination, writers are professionalised just like doctors and lawyers. Mystified, as distant sources of authority. But¬†in a world of blogs, fora and so on,¬†the copyrighted word¬†just doesn’t move fast enough.

So how do you earn a crust when you can’t control access to your sentences? If your words are open-source rather than proprietary technology?¬†Along with that goes the realisation that¬†the Enlightenment notions of ‘universality’ and ‘immortality’ So what does?¬†Writing not for stasis but for¬†movement, communication, community. Speechwriters, copywriters, sloganeers, messageboarders, blogerati, technorati, street-corner poets, wiki technicians. Meme architects.

Abstraction has had its day.  Good writing is political, and politics has to be well-written.