By: Mike Hosking | Monday, March 19, 2012

If the net and all the wonder of modern technology can propel you from nothing to something in about five minutes flat, then Jason Russell has seen both ends of it.

Kony 2012 put a warlord’s record on the global radar faster than anything we’ve seen. A man haunted by the authorities for years. A man accused of the most appalling atrocities, suddenly a poster boy for all that’s wrong with the world. And all done virally – a movie and a Youtube-Twitter campaign, to bring him to justice. Well that was the plan.

But what a mess it’s turned into. Jason Russell, he’s the bloke who made the movie. Jason Russell, if you’ve missed it, went nuts in San Diego over the weekend. He was taken off the streets naked having done a number of, how shall we put it, unusual things. Things that drew a spectacular amount of attention to him. He was bundled off to hospital and his wife is blaming stress.

For all the good the film looked to do, there were the immediate concerns over the charity he runs, and how much charity it actually is. But you can dismiss a lot of that, everyone who tries to achieve or do something good is generally accused of ulterior motive.

But the major stumbling block, the Ugandan people themselves. They didn’t seem to want a bar of it. They said Kony’s gone, has been gone for years, and they didn’t want the pot stirred. In other words, it was an old battle and they’d moved on. So if the people you’re trying to help, don’t want help, that kind of takes the fire out of the revolution. And now this meltdown. Which leads you to perhaps think that for all the wonder of the tech age and being able to bring things to people’s attention in lightening fast fashion, it opens up a fundamental weakness that it’s too easy to do.

And when it’s too easy, you leave yourself exposed. You haven’t done the homework, you haven’t built the revolution slowly. You don’t have time to learn from your mistakes, you don’t gain experience along the way. You don’t build resilience, gained through the process of wisdom. Because all you did was make a movie, flick it on the web and five minutes later, you’re a rockstar, but clearly with no idea of how to handle it.

Next thing you know you’re naked in San Diego being bailed off to hospital.

Meanwhile, where’s Joseph Kony?