wordfalls and scatters

Sky, your argument there is compelling and what I have to say in this comment doesn't apply to your reasons for doing things like learning to type Dvorak. What concerns me is a kind of Leninism that a lot of the people who are proponents of things like Dvorak or open source software as well as people who are activists. It seems like a kind of Vanguardist idea where an exclusive club of people establish a discourse of superiority (of technology, opinion etc) over a proletariat stricken with the false-consciousness that marketing or mainstream media creates. There's definitely truth to the idea that people often fail to act in better and more efficient ways, or to look at a social or geopolitcal issues in a more subtle or reasonable ways because of the dominance of corporate controlled media and marketing. However, I think there's frequently an arrogance attached to the way that many of the afforementioned activists or proponents of open source etc view their insights. It certainly doesn't make what they have to say wrong, but it also doesn't in any way encourage people from outside their circles to engage with these better ideas. To me this wider engagement has always been something that activists etc have very much given up on, preferring instead to propagandise the litany of mistakes we are making (and there are certainly an assload of mistakes). Now I don't have an extensive knowledge of this stuff, so clearly I'm not trying to make a definitive statement on it, I'm really just expressing a personal frustration with what I perceive to be a widely held attitude.

Anyway, what are your thoughts on this?