# 18 Jan 2012, 04:14PM: Ducts:
I've had two astonishing experiences in the last few days.
The first was watching the film Brazil for the first time. If I had watched that at 16 it would have changed the course of my life.
This morning a stranger thanked me for working at the Foundation, as though thanking a soldier for her service in a war.
In Brazil we see everywhere ubiquitous ducts, maintained badly -- sometimes sabotaged -- by Central Services, as heroic volunteers make up the difference by secretly installing workarounds. I write this at my temporary desk, seeing the exposed HVAC ductwork on the third floor of a nondescript San Francisco office building. The more vital duct is the Ethernet cord connecting me to the Internet, to that communally maintained "series of tubes" that gives me work, community, free speech, and the collective wisdom of civilization.
Right now someone needs to save our ducts from sabotage, and the volunteers of the Wikimedia community have courageously decided to sacrifice a day of Wikipedia in the hopes of decisively ending a great threat. We Foundation workers have the privilege of helping.
The second is still ongoing. I am at Wikimedia Foundation headquarters today, and I was here when the word came back that the community had decided to globally black out English Wikipedia in protest of SOPA and PIPA, and I was here when we flipped the switch to do that and some music player started blasting "We're Not Gonna Take It."
Cogito, Ergo Sumana by Sumana Harihareswara is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available by emailing the author at sumanah@panix.com.