This week, I am at Netroots Nation #6 in Minneapolis, and I had planned to bring you a video all about one of the themes I saw running through the first day of panels, speeches and briefings. . . I had planned to bring you video, but I am only here through Sunday and that is probably not enough time to upload my usual eight-or-so minutes because the speed of the internet connection here is pre-millennial. . . again.

This is actually another common theme, one that runs through pretty much every one of the NetNats I have attended. The internet is either not free, not fast, or both. I can remember running down to a lobby to get a connection one year, balancing my computer on the mini fridge near the door of my room another. And always, the waiting—the spinning, gray-barred, “sorry, you are not connected to the internet” waiting.

Now, obviously, the conference organizers cannot really be held responsible for the internet in the hotels—and the wifi in the convention center is certainly an improvement over last year—but damn! Every year I come to the largest concentration of netizens on the planet, and it is like we are suddenly the cast of some cyber version of “Survivor.”

It’s, like, practically “Lord of the Flies.”

OK, perhaps I exaggerate just a tad, but it is a constant—every year a consistent struggle to break through to the super tubular interwebs we remember from home.

Which is also kind of serendipitous because the theme from this year that I wanted to note was that everyone seems to be expressing a frustration with the inability of progressive ideas to break through—break through to the legacy media, break through the establishment-policed, corporate-driven narrative, break out of our bright, shiny ghetto of liberal thought. It seems that, after being quite obviously on the outside during the infancy of the blogosphere, progressives expected a nurturing embrace after the presidential election of 2008—or at least expected not to be punched—and now, not feeling the love, the natives are restless.

I hear the frustration—hell, I feel it, too—but I am not sure if I have yet heard the answer to it. A popular (dare I say) “mantra” is that we have to break out of our silos. The idea is that the left is fractured—fractured over strategy, over tactics, over goals, over issues. It is the belief that, so far, we have not done enough to find commonality among theoretically different movements inside the broader progressive one.

There is probably some, or plenty, of that sort of problem, but it just doesn’t feel, to me, like it is the problem. Fracturing is actually pretty much the way of all revolutions—from 1848 to the present—and heaven knows the right, whose narrative we are trying to crash, has plenty of fissures, from hairline cracks to continental divides.

Another “answer” I heard was that the left needs to be more daring. (“Bold” is one mighty over-used word these days.) And it needn’t be a big production—glitter bombing Newt Gingrich (and, just yesterday, Tim Pawlenty) broke though for one shining moment—it just needs to be original and, ideally, telegenic (think: singing to the president about Bradley Manning). Dan Choi, speaking on a Thursday panel, said we have to be willing to get crazy, “And crazy is not a limited resource among activists.”

I am not against that, but I see three problems. First, the brevity of the breakthrough, second, the need to continually ratchet up the “crazy” to get attention, and third, the fact that crazy often plays right into the establishment stereotypes of lefties. You might get them to cover your action, but being daring does not prevent the legacy media from marginalizing your position.

I also heard several mentions of the need for the left to build its own media complex to compete with the corporate behemoths that now have an iron grip on the narrative. This “tactic,” I’m afraid, seems to be idle dreaming—as far off as say, my ability to stream video at this hotel.

Better, I think, would be a search for the next social organizing tool. The twitter or what-have-you of 2013. Something relatively cheap to use and so new that it has not yet been commandeered by right wing activists or co-opted by capitalists. I am thinking this is possible, but, of course, I am thinking about something I cannot really describe, except to say it will be the next big thing.

And finally, only touched on today, the idea that we need to think beyond silos on the left and attempt to find alliances across traditional boundaries. Looking for what the establishment might think of as “strange bedfellow” pairings to flummox the forces that find it easy to wall-off and marginalize issues embraced solely by the familiar left. That is, real, results-oriented “bipartisanship,” as opposed to the process-driven kind. (Jane has called this “transpartisanship.”)

Yes, I would have talked about all of that in my video—but I cannot upload anything even remotely that long. Once again, progressive ideas marginalized and shut out by the media. . . or, maybe in this case, the medium.