And now for something less serious, but no less important

I'm a little late in mentioning it, but Adam is lit up these days. First he takes on those who like to self-righteously piss on Starbuck's and Ikea. After all, I agree that stickin' it to The Man is a lot more complicated than NoLogo-style activists would have us believe. But here's the important bit:

What I would sorely like to do is channel all the resentment currently directed at what are, after all, relatively benign inhabitants of the corporate sphere where it belongs, to drop all of that change energy on the institutions that actually are responsible for far greater deformations of the world. Is a little sense of scale too much to ask for?

Nope. Makes perfect sense to me. Not every fight is a good fight, and learning to fight the right battles may be tricky, but it's pretty important. It also helps to understand what sort of change you are trying to affect. If you're looking for points of intervention, you should probably understand the differences between points of decision, production, consumption, destruction and, my personal favourite, points of assumption.

And today Adam posted on something I have also noticed recently: what happens when the fringe goes mainstream? He uses porn as an example, and I have often wondered what will happen to notions of intimacy in a porn-saturated world? How will it change the ways we understand gender, sex and sexuality? How we view our own bodies and desires? Or how we react to the desires and bodies of others? And what about when all of this is directly - and for some, exclusively - tied to mass production and consumption? And then I wonder what is considered fringe sexuality when porn/BDSM/whatever is mainstream? What does it mean to be on the sexual edge these days? But then again, I'm not sure I really want to know ;)