Riot Rule #1: “Complaining is never enough.”

While I was in high school, I spent four years on the debate team, and those four years ended up being some of the most important for me, at least in how I grew as a person. It definitely must have left some kind of impression, because I’ve spent the past six and a half years still judging the activity, spending time with friends (high school students, coaches, and other judges) and making a few extra bucks on the weekends.

Anyway, when I was debating, my partner and I were notorious for running a kind of argument called a “kritik.” In short, it’s a complex, philosophical / conceptual argument that addresses some basic assumptions of debate as an activity, and it was, at the time, pretty cutting-edge. But one of the most common responses that teams make (still) against kritiks is that even if it asks good questions, it doesn’t present any kind of alternative. Now there are argumentative ways out of this, but it does highlight a real-world truth: complaining by itself rarely accomplishes anything.

I thought about this after catching up on my Google reader and finding a great post from Brian Mathews in response to John Berry’s article, “The Vanishing Librarians.” Brian, to say the least, is not happy with what Berry has to say:

He’s one of those people who loves to complain, criticize, and toss around monkey-wrenches—without offering any SOLUTIONS.

And it’s true: we can whine and complain all day, and we can even use the most guerilla methods to sabotage the status quo. But unless we have some kind of solution, or at least an alternative that we’re willing to defend, we sell ourselves and our ideas short. In the end, we only risk alienating ourselves and dooming our potentially great ideas to failure.

Brian’s a really cool cat, and he gets big points for taking the riot in a positive direction (and not to mention for having any number of ideas that are good enough to steal borrow). I keep meaning to pay a visit to the Georgia Tech library and see some of the great stuff he’s working on in person.