"If voting changed anything, they'd abolish it." - Ken Livingstone

I do believe in the power of voting but I think in this country it is highly over-rated. I believe each and every dollar you spend is a vote for what kind of world you want to live in. Added up, I believe your total lifetime spending has more of an impact on the world than all the people you did or didn't vote for. To me, it is clearly propaganda to suggest that we can actually solve our serious problems through a corporate-sponsored media event lasting almost two out of every four years. Even if we elect someone with good intentions we don't know how she/he would hold up in D.C. under various new pressures to sell out in small ways here and there (to accomplish this or that goal, of course).

Daily Kos: Social Media Revolution being Infiltrated, Co-opted and Undermined

"According to an embedded MS Word document found in one of the HBGary emails, it involves creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated "persona management" software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other. Then, to top it off, the team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online. And all of this is for the purposes of infiltration, data mining, and (here's the one that really worries me) ganging up on bloggers, commenters  and otherwise "real" people to smear enemies and distort the truth.