I just sent this email to friends and family to explain what I do for Free Press — and why they should donate to it. Read on:

Friends and family,

You may have noticed that I post a lot on Facebook and send a lot of emails about stopping big companies from blocking our right to communicate online. It’s pretty earnest, wonky stuff. But here’s part of why I do it.

Mobile phones play a huge part in our lives. We depend on them to communicate with family and friends, to read the news, to chart the world, and to get engaged in politics. These are all forms of free expression that we take for granted — but we shouldn’t.

As repeated incidents are showing us, phone carriers are committed to trampling our right to speak freely online.

So I’ve been busy calling Verizon to task when it blocks applications, highlighting when phone carriers make it harder for people to get online, and calling for investigations into companies that track our behavior in secret.

I’ve done all these things with Free Press, the organization where I’ve worked for close to three years. We focus on changing the media through policy. That often means pushing the FCC to enforce rules meant to protect the public interest (as we’re doing in the Verizon case). Sometimes it means advocating for legislation that would help protect us from corporate overreach, or fighting against bills that would increase that overreach.

We’ve had some amazing successes this year. We beat back AT&T’s attempt to buy T-Mobile, a terrible deal that would have resulted in lost jobs and higher prices. And we stopped the Senate’s attempt to overturn open Internet protections that, for the most part, let us speak online without fear of corporate censorship.

If you like what we’ve been doing, and you think we should keep doing it, please consider making a small donation to Free Press: https://freepress.actionkit.com/donate/staffchallenge2011/

Your gift is even tax deductible.

If you don’t want to make a donation, click on the link anyway to see a group picture of me and my colleagues. I’m easy to spot; I’m the smiling idiot at left-center.

If you do choose to donate, be sure to select my name from the drop-down menu.

Thank you and happy holidays.

Josh

“Re: Jobs, maybe it’s better said that he changed people’s worlds rather than the world.”

Yes, it is better said that way.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

So wise. Watch the whole speech, in which he talks about getting on with the big things in life before it’s too late.

I feel the same way, to a degree. It’s a shame that such a genius had to die so young (and damn you, pancreatic cancer). He definitely changed my life: Apple computers were my gateway to technology and the Internet and the iPhone showed me the future of mobile technology. My iPad is my constant companion.

As many people are pointing out, Steve Jobs understood the human side of technology better than anyone; he boiled computing down to its essential core, and as a result produced devices that felt like extensions of ourselves. Millions of people came to understand the beauty of networked technology in this way.

And yet, I wonder if there isn’t a tinge of elitism, or out-of-touch-ism, to all of us who thank him for “changing the world.”

A voice inside me asks, “whose world?” For whom is the world different thanks to Steve Jobs? Those in the developed world who can afford to buy Macbooks and iPhones, who are trained to appreciate Good Design and who, like good capitalists, love and respect business-geniuses like Jobs, Edison, Carnegie, Bell — those kind of people can thank Jobs for changing the world in which they live.

And yet, as the New York Times recently pointed out, given his extraordinary wealth, Jobs has done relatively little in the way of philanthropy. Maybe he donated under a different name; maybe a massive foundation will be set up in his honor. We’ll see what happens.

But when it came to those millions of people who couldn’t afford his devices, who didn’t see the beauty of his vision, the world was not changed. It went on, with all of its inequality, hunger and suffering.

This is not to say we shouldn’t celebrate Steve Jobs the man — we should do so, completely, if only to celebrate the human spirit and the high art of turning magic into a real-life commodity — but we should merely check ourselves when we talk of “changing the world.”

That is all. RIP Steve.

Here’s a quote from Dave Winer that got me thinking:

“The transcontinental railroad was a great idea because of its scope and its ability to transform human civilization. To make something like that happen you have to do a lot more than ‘have’ an idea. You have to develop it, make it work, and then convince everyone else to use it.”

Exactly. And the space to turn great ideas into reality is something many of us want badly, but are finding lacking.

And this is a shot of me, Nicole and Arlo the day before Noah was born:

I’m posting these pics for two reasons:

1) I’m proud of my family, which is comprised of two cute kids and their decent-looking parents;

2) I want everything for my kids, including a world where no single entity — neither the government nor a giant corporation — can stop them from being who they want to be, or from saying what they want to say.

The first point is just the honest truth. And while the second point might sound naive, or trite, it is also the honest truth.

That’s why I work with Free Press, a non-profit advocacy and policy group, to help reform the American media system so that more voices — from all over the political and ideological spectrum — are represented in our media, and so that giant corporations aren’t the ones deciding who deserves to be heard.

Sadly, the current state of affairs isn’t encouraging. Today, the FCC voted to pass rules that it claims will enforce “Net Neutrality” — the concept that all web sites and Internet services should be given equal treatment by providers like Comcast and Verizon. The trouble is, those very providers are the ones who wrote these rules, so they are full of so many loopholes that consumers like you and me — not to mention the Googles and Amazons of tomorrow — will be unprotected.

From the birth of the Web in the early 1990s to today, everyone has been an equal citizen on the Internet. That all changed today. Instead of the continuation of the open, wacky, and free Internet as we know it, we could get something more like cable: We’ll be forced to buy packages featuring websites that big corporations want you to see, with no easy way for you and me to access only the sites we want, and to make ourselves into the next Internet stars.

I don’t want Arlo and Noah to grow up in this world.

But there are some encouraging signs in the media reform world as well. Last weekend, after tireless advocacy from Free Press and allies like the Prometheus Radio Project, the House and the Senate passed the Local Community Radio Act, which will usher in thousands of low-power FM (LPFM) radio stations across the country, finally allowing communities to compete with the automated playlists and faceless DJs of corporate radio.

That’s the kind of world I want for my kids: A place where people of all stripes have access to communications of all kinds, without big companies acting as gatekeepers. If Arlo wants to start a radio station in our town, now he can. But if Noah wants to become the next Sergey Brin (Google) or Craig Newmark (craigslist), the path just got a lot hairier.

This is why I’m writing: To ask you to help Free Press change the course of this terrible future. We’re a non-profit based in Northampton, MA and Washington, DC that takes no money from corporations or government, and depends on donations from folks like you to keep our work going.

We’re known as some of the smartest and most effective thinkers, advocates and researchers in the world of communication policy. We get stuff done (like the LPFM bill) and we move the ball forward on issues like Net Neutrality thanks to tireless advocacy and policymaking inside the Beltway and grassroots activism across the country.

If you agree with me that things like Net Neutrality and community radio are worth fighting for, please consider donating $5 or $10 to Free Press. You can donate using the following link (please be sure to select my name from the “I am making this gift in support of the following member of staff” dropdown menu*):
https://freepress.actionkit.com/donate/staff_challenge_2010/

Such a small donation is equivalent to the cost of a couple of beers, a burrito or two, or a movie ticket. But I’d like to think the value is just a bit more than any of those things.

*Because we lobby for media policies in the public interest, contributions to Free Press Action Fund are not tax-deductible as charitable contributions or as business expenses under IRC §162(e).