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Is The Net Revolution Breaking Faith?
It's sometimes hard to spot such consequences; Net culture is not known for carefully dissecting its own implications. In an essay called "The Shape of the Electronic Republic," part of a collecction called Composing Cyberspace, (Richard Holeton, editor), technological historian Langdon Winner wonders whether the computer revolution is committed to any particular set of social ideas. If so, he wonders, what are they? Where are they being proposed and argued?
It's a valid question, even if it assumes the computer revolution was shaped like other revolutions, by a handful of dogmatic leaders advocating specific principles.
There are powerful new political values developing online, and sooner or later, even politicians will begin speaking to them: the hacker ethic of creativity and exploration, which has brought joy back to work; the passion for freely exchanged information exemplified by Open Source and Free software; the individualism released by decentralized software programs and communications systems; and skepticism toward traditional ideas of intellectual property and ownership of culture, to name a few.
And yes, a new strain of rationalist political sensibility is emerging from this tech generation. But Winner is partly right: we have few forums where these ideas can be intelligently debated, and few understandings of common goals, if there even are any. Some of the best minds in cyberspace are setting their preferences so they can block out all that noise and confusion.
Many of the early Net philosophers gathered around the now-corporatized Wired magazine. But the explosion of a many-to-many, distributed information system, from Weblogs to P2P to IM, discourges common gathering spots. Both the volume of data and epidemic hostility have risen. As a result, data is filtered, moderated and refiltered. There are few places where people consider the kind of questions Winner legitimately asks, so the kind of discussion Winner wants poses a conundrum: either somebody has to assert control over public spaces online, or this revolution may become Balkanized, flaming and moderating itself to death.
"To mention revolution also brings to mind the relationships of different social classes," Winner writes. "Will the computer revolution bring about the victory of one class over another? Will it be the occasion for a realignment of class loyalties?" Such questions rarely intrude on the busy, pragmatic world of computer science, engineering and marketing, he cautions.
"Those actively engaged in promoting the transformation -- hardware and software engineers, managers of microelectronics firms, computer salesmen, and the like -- are busy pursuing their own ends ... But the sheer dynamism of technical and economic activity in the computer industry evidently leaves its members little time to ponder the historical significance of their own activity."
While they're not pondering, the consequences they create continue apace. In Virtual States: The Internet and the Boundaries of the Nation-State, Jerry Everard warns that too little thought has been given to the systematic inequalities that globalization engenders. In order to develop a telecommunications structure, for instance, developing countries like Vietnam, Cambodia, and India are forced to turn to multinational corporations to set up and manage their computer networks. This leads to the rapid establishment of infrastructure in profit-generating major urban areas, but it often leaves rural areas to fend for themselves. Thus in India, Everard writes, though there is a thriving software industry, the vast bulk of the subcontinent has yet to gain access even to telephones.
Such realities are almost unknown to this generation of tech workers and enthusiasts. As John Raulston Saul wrote, this is a brilliant, successful and creative culture, but an Unconscious Civilization in many ways, unaware of the political realities spawned by the very technology they are making and using, or by the daunting challenges the unchecked rise of corporatism poses. Sometimes the fallout can be serious. As a consequence, it created an Unconscious Revolution.
In his new book republic.com University of Chicago Law Professor Cass Sunstein warns that the emerging Net culture -- busy creating personalized "me" media -- threatens to undermine one of the basic tenets of democracy -- the willingness of people with diverse viewpoints to speak to and hear one another.
The Net is beginning to endanger a democratic society, Sunstein fears, with its fragmentation, advanced moderation and filtering systems. What makes free expression work, Sunstein asks? His answer: exposure to materials that people might not have chosen in advance. Unplanned, unprogrammed encounters are central to democracy. A culture that offers increasingly customized speech control preferences enables people to eliminate from their screens and minds anything they might not want to see or hear or might disagree with.
Why are people content to have their inputs so restricted? In part, because free speech online has nearly buckled under the onslaught of flamers, fanatics, spammers, and other e-vandals. The Digital Citizen, driven underground, has taken to lurking. (Not Jefferson's idea either. If the Continental Congress had used moderating programs, it's hard to believe they would ever have agreed on a Constitution).
So the Net revolution, as revolutions will, has veered off, slowed down, and confounded expectations.
Next: Is Open Source the New Jerusalem?
On the front of a poor country, what are we doing about it and how different is it from what we were doing before technology? During the 20's we thought we were kings, but reality hit us. Maybe the media could do a more justified approach to the problems of the world rather than create tantamount upheaveals which don't really exist. (case in point being watch the media talk about our current economic clime. Everyone from Fidelities ex pres to Greenspun himself are saying this is within normal bounds. Market correction, 15, 7, 2 year cycles of possible slows and gains, etc.)
We've got a long road to go, and due to technology it has the ability to shift much more readily, and much more apparently now. 5 years ago I thought I knew what was going to happen. Minor things like browser wars and such are easy to forcast, but where Internet2 begins and FTL communication come in, who knows. I follow a general Libertarian view, but are we ready for that much freedom? I feel I am, but by looking at all the worried day traders, they obviously have too much control.
Where are we going to be in 50 years. Severly poor countries ignored or snubbed by their neighbors? Will a global war for some resource take hold? Will space travel offer us anything but experiments, or can we use the moon as a resource? Will we find a better energy source, a more valid government, or shall we be relegated to a preindustrial age due to terrorism?
I don't know anymore, and you know what, I don't care. I'm living my life the best and most constructive way possible gaining whatever experiences I can along the way. That is what works for me. What I really wish is that we could legally cull the herd from time to time.
"Life is all about strategy, mathematics and psychological perceptiveness."
"If you do a complete revolution, you end up at the same point where you started"
--
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Are new political values really being formed online, or is it simply a case of people being able to promote their own values and opinions more easily on the net?
It could be that we're now more aware of previously underground politics than we were.
It is the traditional media, such as newspapers and television which have a relatively monolithic, inbred viewpoint.
Take something like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Before the net, for the most part you'd have to rely on the relatively bland reporting from traditional newspapers and maybe a quick 2 minute clip on the news if something big happens.
On the Internet it takes just a few minutes to get not only very detailed coverage, but coverage from any number of political points of view, from far right Israeli supporters to far left Palestinian supporters.
If some people still choose only to get one narrow view, it's because they've been trained so well by traditional media outlets.
I'm bored of this. You are now the first /. editor to have the amazing honor (nyuk nyuk) of being placed on my "please don't plague me with articles by this editor" list. In case you care why, it has something to do with a neverending string of pompous, self-important articles about this sort of thing, whose only apparent purpose is to inflate the average slashdotter's sense of superiority. Not only are you a huge Karma Whore (though you're an editor and don't need it), you are also in Dogbert's words "an elitist technology bigot", and I'm tired of it.
/. for real news.
If I want to talk to self-important assholes with rampant ego problems, there's always alt.religion.kibology. I read
Sorry to post offtopic here, but I thought you deserved to know.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
As usual, Katz is way off the mark. He's suggesting that people online should discuss rather random things, whether or not they disagree. A purely 'Democratic' conversation as he defines it would consist of:
User1: I like eggs.
User2: Anyone know the current market capitalization of the top 17 S&P 500 companies?
User1: Xena, Princess Warrior is cool.
User3: Abortionists kill babies. Kill abortionists!
User1: I like babies. They're delicious.
The problem is, is that people in real life, out walking in the crowded streets of NYC, don't randomly meet and discuss randomly. People generally don't talk to people outside of their church (very narrow political/moral spectrum) or their work (similar political/moral spectrum). True, you won't find any Mac zealots on Slashdot, but still, online discussions are MUCH more diverse and ideas are flying around MUCH more than they do in meatspace ('real' life).
What can we do? The best thing to do IMHO is to apply a sort of "darwinistic" moderation system. Comments and ideas that are inherently inferior are filtered from view. For example, on slashdot, if one idea is bad, it can be moderated so low that most people cannot see it. Then, any replies (i.e., descendants) of that message are also rendered invisible.
This sort of system makes it easier to concentrate on the more important (or better), and thus, more highly moderated comments. Slashdot has created a system that is IMHO ahead of its time. I think we will see and more and more of this kind of darwinistic content control over the internet as the signal to noise ratio rises, and I think that it will lead to a better exchange of ideas, and in the end, everyone will benefit. Censorship will not be necessary because the system will inherently censor unwanted material. Thus inappropriate material will not be visible to thus who should not be viewing it. Since moderation is established by community standards, this actually fits the legal definition of obscenity, so any negatively moderated ideas are automatically, legally, obscene. This frees the admins of such a medium from legal obligation to monitor content.
Thus, it is clear that such a sytem is both necessary and beneficial, rather than restrictive. Given the current environment of net culture, with its pervasise goatsecx links and rampant flamage and trollage, such a system will unquestionably do more good than harm.
Know someone who is stealing cable? Report them!
Every time someone mentions virtual community on the internet my stomach turns. It really is just that, virtually a community, but not quite. Sure people will ramble on about the WELL and other successful ventures like slashdot. However these are merely the exceptions that prove the rule. The only kind of online community that really had any credence was the old BBS scene. This was due to the fact that these people generally lived in the same geographic region, had similar environments, and had common threads, the very things that define community. They tended to have face-to-face get togethers (anyone remember board parties??) and were generally more intimate than anyone in the vastness of the corporatized internet is capable of.
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
To read these comments, one would think that it looks like in a year or two the Net would be a passe, forgotten fad. One would think that it was expected that so many things would change, but that they never did, and that no lasting impact resulted.
Excuse me? Isn't that a bit strange, particularly to see it "posted" (how long ago was that word used by so many in such a way) on a website, particularly one like Slashdot? I'm typing this, and looking at words that once upon a very recent time were not in existence or used the way they currently are. "Preview," "URL," "HTML," these terms have become a part of our lives. Granted, the general population does not use them as commonly as the more tech-savvy of us do, but what about other things? How many people use IM clients? Does anyone remember how arduous it was to have a pen pal as a kid, in another country, and struggle with the mail systems as we passed letters back and forth? Now, we can chat on IRC, AOL, ICQ, or just "plain old ordinary email." Imagine that...email, high-speed "written" communication without hindrance by distance or border, now viewed as commonplace.
Okay, so the get-rich-quick people who went gaga over IPOs and whatnot perhaps got a bit misled, or did the misleading themselves, depending on who you ask. Is it not profound that such a phenomenon could take place at all? That an entire class of people could come into being, rise and then fall in plain view of the world?
The bottom line is this. Throughout time, breakthroughs in communications produce massive change, like a nitrous oxide shot into the evolutionary engine of society. Still, however, it takes time for that engine to accelerate, and the speed still carries for a time after the nitrous is no longer pumping into the engine. And, most importantly of all, even after speed returns to normal, you've still come all that way farther down the road, and your view through the windshield is no longer what it was just a short time ago. And unlike a car, there is no reverse here.
And now, as I preview this, I see the irony of ironies in what I am saying...the signature I've had all along:
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Jon is right about one thing, we need to stop treating the third world as a mercantilist soruce of raw materials, we must stop IT imperialism.
The third world needs to be brought into the net age, without shameless profiteering. This will eliminate lots of human suffering, once all humans are connected in one network. Think of how many Linus's and RMS's there are in third world countries like Nepal, Nairobi, Rhodesia, Malaysia and France. Think of what good they could accomplish once they get on the net and start communicating with other like minded people.
I call for the UN to mandate the IT companies sell older networking equipment, PC's and software far below cost to third world countries, to help leapfrog them into the net age (much like pharmaceutical companies have humanely decided to offer AIDS drugs below cost to AIDS-stricken Africans). As a species, we have far too much to lose.
Even if you read /. at -1, the majority of comments posted to an article are on topic. Yet, I browse most articles at 3, and set my threshold lower only for those articles I'm especially interested in. It's not that the posts at 2 and 1 and often even 0 don't have interesting things to say, it's just that I don't have time to read all those comments.
Katz's identification of the problem can be summed up in two sentences:
And as we've come to expect from Katz, no suggested solution is proffered.
Why are people content to have their input filtered this way, Katz asks? Because most of us accept the reality that this volume of communication imposes upon us, and don't take it personally if other people choose not to read our comments.
"The Net is beginning to endanger a democratic socieety, Sunstein fears, with its fragmentation, advanced moderation and filtering systems."
Oh, please. Before the net, Jon, you and I had no way to communicate at all. Now you can talk, and if I choose to, I can listen to you; and if I choose to, I can ignore you. How is this less free than the situation before the net, when you and I had no effective means of communication at all, regardless of whether we wanted to communicate or not?
Freedom of speech includes more than its mere name would suggest: freedom of speech includes the freedom not to speak, the freedom to listen, and the freedom not to listen. If people choose to exercise their freedom not to listen, that is democracy in action, and not a mortal threat to democracy, as Katz would have us believe.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
There IS no "Net revolution." What revolution there was has already happened, and the goofiness with IPOs, the stock market problems (which will turn around--they always do), and annoyed lusers, is nothing but fallout from trying to cash in on a done deal.
Of course, what ELSE do you expect from Katz? He seems to think that his pathetic life will be made triumphant via the net. Dream on Jon!
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Various people, Professor Sunstein at times among them, have always feared systems that are not designed to promote the messages they like, and supress the messages they dislike. They don't like political systems that seem to let the wrong kind of people 'win' and do not like systems that let the 'right' kind of message get filtered.
Democracy in a fundamental way requires a desire among a people for a common destiny. The idea of community can be an inclusive or exclusive thing. For example, the 'melting pot' theory of America is an inclusive model. The communities of the Amish are fundamentally exclusive. An Amish community does not desire a common destiny with the non-Amish community that surrounds it, it is designed to promote a separate, perhaps compatible destiny.
Democracy should be inclusive through reciprocity. That is to say, I include you and you include me. It should not be designed to be controlling. Slavery systems 'include' slaves in the society, but not in a democratic way.
The content regulation of media is primarily based on the concept of the right to not hear something. That is why there are certain words that can't be used during prime time television. One solution would be to tell people that if they don't like the media, TURN IT OFF. Then listening is not forced. The alternative, is to determine what is ok to say or not ok to say to avoid forced listening. This is Sunstein's preferred mode -- after all, he is afraid of people turning other people off, or having the freedom to do so. [Ok, maybe they aren't against the FREEDOM to do it, merely the EXERCISE of that freedom. That seems to be a distinction without a difference to me.]
Online communities are not exclusive by design. One can certainly be a member of multiple ones, and use that to cross-pollinate. SLASHDOT shows a fair bit of that. Filtering and moderation biases messages to be sure. However, filtering and moderation within one community does not mean that all communities share the same biases.
The kalidescope of viewpoints is complete when viewing the many pieces out there, not one piece in isolation. The ability to bring messages from many places in a short period of time or to filter and refilter make it possible to enjoy that kalidescope of views more easily. However, it does not readily submit to control of messages and results, which does seem to be what Professor Sunstein wants. I do not fear as he does.
Some of this is "merely" the result of the leveling of the discussion to include people of all levels of education and cluelessness. We do not have the discussion dominated by large numbers of learned elders. We have a lot of people who participate on a casual basis, and we have teenagers who love their mischief in all of it's forms. You can add to the list for a long time.
The problems is that these varieties of human culture are not completely compatible with each other. And when you have this mixed all together, one crowd is turned off by another. Republicans vs Democrats, for a nice safe example.
Looking over the past few weeks, we see this institutionalized even here at Slash. Let's face it, on some topics, the Faithful of Slash are as intense and dogmatic as any religion or political operative.
Unfortunately the primary technique becomes one of Slash and Burn political discussion. The technology for interfacing different human cultures needs to be upgraded. If your technique and primary protocol for dealing with a culture alien to you is the Slash and Burn protocol, You will find that when there are too many people using it, you wind up with a desert.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Slashdot's "Stuff that matters" is a great example of a failed promiss.
Someone you trust is one of us.
All internet buisnesses that arn't B2B fail. ISPs steadily lose memberships because of the lack of new content for customers. People with short attention spans depart the net to watch Friends reruns.
Flash-in-the-pan products die. Quick buck makers stop trying to conjure customer bases for stupid products and go back to making infomercials. Commercial releases decline. Software gets written because people ask for and use it.
Wait.
This is the *worst* thing? This sounds like a return to the uberelite early days of the net, before usenet was invaded by AOL, before spam, before the browser wars, before the invasion of incompatible protocols. Is there a lever that I can pull to cause this to happen? Sure, I'd be out of a job, but Camelot would be reborn. Small tradeoff, perhaps.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
I don't think it was a revolution as much as the natural progression of evolution in human communications. Did people think they'd use a telephone til 2246?
Quite.
Television was supposed to usher in a utopia of universal education and look what that's become: Mind-numbing fluff, and the highest return-on-investment of any industry. It's not going away any time soon, is it?
The net was put together by people who have individual dreams of doing something neat. The hype about the net was put together primarily by people who were putting together hype rather than putting togehter the net. Yes they quoted some of the people working on it. So what? It's still a lot of hype.
And some of the people who put together parts of the net's applications were inspired by the hype. Again, so what? Some of the people who put together Motorola's Star Tak cellular phones were obviously inspired by Star Trek communicators. But that doesn't mean there wouldn't be cellular phones - or even folding ones - without a "Star Trek Culture", or that the lack of Iridium service would mean "the Cellular Phone Revolution" was "Breaking Faith".
It's one thing to have faith in people who actually MADE you a promise, and have them willfully fail to execute on it. It's quite another to have faith in the promises of media hype-master hangers-on and blame the real workers when the bullshit you were doesn't match what actually materializes.
And if some investors are paniced because they believed the hype, bought into the scams, and something completely different from what they expected happened, again so what? Something damned profitable for all concerned is still materializing, and it will still change the world. There's no free lunch, and no guaranteed investment. You have to do your own due dilligence, sort out the companies that will really build something profitable and invest in THOSE if you want your money to grow, and to stay around once the storms have subsided.
The networked world will continue to be a thing and to grow in my opinion. The men who have invested their lives into it won't let it die without a fight from hell.
Hear hear. And as one of the people building it I can assure you we're still on the job and it will get better.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I think you hit on something no one else here has yet, that there's too much information being posted online on a daily basis for one human to read. Even if you only ever read /. you'd still be hard pressed to go through every story and every comment. I am super happy that I can go to Google and find practically anything, anytime. That doesn't mean I need (or want) to know everything all the time. I come to /. and read up on legal poo and science, then I run off to Zeldman's site and worship the god(s), then go to suck.com and look at the pretty pictures. ;-)
The Internet cannot be completely devoured, it can only be grazed. Moderation and filtering can help a person do that more effectively sometimes; so what?
/."
"I'm not a bitch, I just play one on
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
The revolution is just beginning...
-----
crazy dynamite monkey
All joking aside, I have to agree, the " Revolution" has slowed down, BUT it is still going on. One just has to look at all stories about DeCSS, DCMA, etc, on /. to see that some people still care about freedom, and rights.
"Underground movements" allways take a while to succeed. The "Net Revolution" (whatever that is supposed to mean?!) is no different, since there are many issues, with no clear "leader" stepping up to speak/act about them.
No one said the internet *guaranteed* freedom. It just allows for "free" exchange of ideas, whether governments like it or not.
--
"The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite." -- Thomas Jefferson
Back before the internet sucked, every September brought a new influx of college students who experienced internet access for the first time. For about four weeks newsgroups and IRC were in chaos as people flamed, ranted, and trolled away merrily. Then 99% of these people discovered alcohol, dating, football, or classes, and went away.
Unfortunately, now we have a steady influx of new "netizens" all the time, and television, magazine, and radio ads encouraging more and more clueless people to join the internet revolution. This is the problem. You no longer need to be at a university, fairly large high-tech corporation, or government agency to get on the Net, any moron can do it. And most morons, unfortunately, do.
And that's the problem. There is no "vision", there is no evolution of anything with meaning on the Internet. It's just a giant mass of people, most of whom have nothing to say, trying as hard as they can to say it and be heard.
Oh well, it hardly matters any more. Everything worthwhile and free is being destroyed by idiots (IRC servers being taken down by packet kids, newsgroups being turned into porn and warez clearinghouses are useless for discussions, etc) and the other "free" forums are dying off as the advertising revenue that kept them going dries up. In a few more years the only "content" will be provided by giant media corporations. Interactivity will be limited to choosing from a set of pasteurized, homogenized "content" designed to maximize clickthroughs and eyeballs. The Net, like everything else that gains mass popularity, will fall to the lowest common denominator.
And we deserve it.
I'm not sure the Net was ever really revolutionary. In the early days, the Connected Internet(AKA Darpanet or NSF Net depending on year)was the private domain of academic institutions and the only people online were scientists, engineers and other educated weirdos. These people used Net to the greatest advantage due to their technical and intellectual sophistication. The majority of discussions at least seemed to be weighty and erudite, but that might just be nostalgia. Let's be honest here. alt.lemurs and alt.sex.bondage.particle-physics were two of my favorite usenet groups in those bygone days, but I can't say the discussions there were revolutionary or even relevant. Silly, yes, relevant no. And how many bull sessions on the early muds and mucks were about nothing more than the relative merits of Vaxes vs Unix. The important stuff in the early days was all work related, like exhcanging data, or sending commands to a polar radar station. Yeah, there was a lot of interesting social stuff going on the murkier corners of gopher space and in the Mud/Muck world, but that was all very experimental. It also a very elite crowd of people, who despite their individual personalities, tended to be cut from the same socio-economic cloth.
Nowadays, everyone's getting online, so there's a lot of noise out there, but there's also a lot more signal than there used to be. Yeah we've got more stock tickers and cat pictures out there than we'll ever know what to do with, but there's also a lot more people setting down their thoughts than there ever has been. The web in a way is the greatest collections of 'zines ever put together. For those who have grown up late in the technological boom a 'zine is little self published paper magazine often given away for free at friendly newsstands and bookstores. Even before the web, people were finding ways to promulgate and exchange ideas. However putting together something as simple as a 'zine is not a trivial task and getting it distributed widely is even harder. The web has changed that to some extent. You can not put up something similar for very little money and effort. Getting exposure is more diffiucult, but if you network well, you can get other people of like mind to link to your effort. For those who say that there's nothing worthwhile or challenging on the net, I'll link to two sites I found recently. Agree with them or not, they are windows into a culture that the mainstream does not want to acknowledge. Gangland Express and Sleepy Lagoon. Both of these sites helped illuminate a world that had always been dark to me growing up. And, that's the potential power of the information overload. Anyone can get on and say something. Yeah, there's a lot of noise, but you can use tools to filter the noise and tune in what you want. Tools like search engines. The main difference between the Net and other modern media is that the consumer has to be an active particpant to utilize the Net.
In a way, I'd argue that the revolution has not yet begun. We as a society are still learning to deal with the Net and the sheer volume of information it brings us. Sure the deliurm of the 'new thing' has faded from the Internet, but that does not mean it's going to go away. The Net is undergoing a correction that puts the supply in line with the actual demand. Not biggie there. Contrary to the pundits, the revolution of the Net has not happened, nor will it happen. The Net will be used by people to exchange ideas and to organize. Those people may well engender a revlotion, but that revolution will happen outside of the Net. That revolution will happen in the real world, in the courts, the polls, and even in the streets.
Imagine that...email, high-speed "written" communication without hindrance by distance or border, now viewed as commonplace.
The Bottom Line, if you will of Internet technology has already been reached, that is to say, HTML and email. Those two things (glued together and empowered by things like DNS) are the A#1 undeniable miracle of the Internet. The rest is fluff. Powerful and interesting fluff to be sure, but if we we were all to suddenly be reduced to 33bps dialup connections tomorrow, the real (useful and productive) structure and substance of the Internet would be unharmed.
A ten-second web video sound-bite from CNN is kind of cool, but infinitely slower in every regard compared to some text and a few photos.
Exchanginge email and searching/viewing/posting documents and pictures are the most amazing and earth-shattering aspects of this new 'internet culture'.
Everything else is extra and expendable.
**>>BELCH
On the net, everyone has the possibility to have an equal say. But, being used to the traditional system, many people still go get their news from CNN.com and don't comment much. Others are too excited about being heard that they don't stop to think about what they say. It's still too new to everyone. But life has an incredible capacity to adapt itself. Things will change, and are changing. And everyone sharing ideas, debating opinions are reaching compromises is what democracy is all about. This can only be achieved on a local scale through physical meetings. And it can't be achieved through traditional medias. The net can make this possible, but the net is only a tool. Everything will depend on how it is used. Tools to not make revolutions. Humans use tools to make revolutions possible.
To summarise, the net is not a revolution: it is merely an instrument of the revolution.
Will the computer revolution bring about the victory of one class over another?
Right now, the financial elite is winning over the people. Most of you don't want to see it, but your beloved capitalism is leading us to totalitarism and the plain destruction of our Mother Earth. The net is an awesome tool for the people to inform and organize themselves to counter this. Do not expect it to do it by itself. And the technology doesn't discriminate and make itself unavailable to the masses and make them poorer and poorer. The elitism of the distribution system makes it that way. The internet could be available to everyone without any problem. And internet doesn't deceive my expectations at all. It only deceives those who wanted it to make them rich.
A revolution only leads to the same starting point if the people then put someone else in power. A true revolution gives the power to the people. Participative democracy is not only possible: it's the way to go if we want to reclaim our earth, society, freedom and happiness.
Related Links : An Anarchist FAQ - Independent Media Center - Mobilisation for Global Justice - World Social Forum - Industrial Workers of the World
I used to just think that Jon Katz was no more coherent than the average journalist. I didn't think he was a putz, just a journalist. Never mistake eloquence for intelegence.
Now, I see what everybody else has been seeing. Jon Katz is a putz.
A digital revolution? faith in it? goals fer cryin out loud? Pass the bong, man.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
It's a valid question, even if it assumes the computer revolution was shaped like other revolutions, by a handful of dogmatic leaders advocating specific principles.
Is any revolution shaped by one individual (or even a handful)? I'm not certain that's very often true. Just how much influence can a single individual have, in changing the world?
My (completely unenlightened) guess is that more often than not, revolutions occur when a significant proportion of the population already feel that things should be different. But most people don't want to do anything about it.
Then, somebody who has the balls stands up and says it out loud. If there isn't sufficient support among the people, the individual would get shunned, ridiculed, or nailed to a cross.
But if there is enough support, the individual is hailed as the leader of a revolution. Really, the individual is not much more than a figurehead.
If there is, indeed, a revolution taking place, I think we just haven't found the right figurehead yet.
--
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Katz is contradicting himself here yet again. In previous pieces he has argued that the "revolution" of the Internet was leaderless and in many ways anarchic.
But how can a revolution without leaders and without any stated goals have any... goals for the public to be confused about?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The 'failure' of the net, in a commercial sense, could be what saves it in the end, forcing us to actually do something intelligent with it!
1. Enlightened/chaotic discussions on forums like Slashdot.
2. Free exchange of scientific ideas and data.
3. Single point of org for all of the world's porn.
**>>BELCH
The Jobs-onian loudmouths are just being silenced by time and the drying supply of 'mad-money'.
Real revolutions occur away from the lights and the soap-boxes. They chug quietly in the background until, for some usually unforseeable reason (which, afterwards, all the 'revolutionaries' will say they foresaw), will shrug or shift in someway that forces everyone and everything to change their footing very quickly, some successfully and some not.
Real revolutions are more like acts of nature, beyond the grasp (but on the lips) of the Pundits and Polititians.
**>>BELCH
We need to get some perspective on this, the Internet has been, and will continue to be, an incredible success.
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You've got your damn email and you've got your damn HTML. What you do with it is up to you. If your efforts at 'congregating' with your revolutionary friends on the web are so easily thwarted, well, you must be pretty damn stupid.
As far as 'revolution-supressing devices' are concerned, I'm all for them. Too many 'revolutions' are called for by those who have given up on their own lives and mistakenly believe that everyone else feels the same (or worse, 'should' feel the same but aren't 'enlightened' enough to) and that a 'clearing of the board' by force will somehow leave them in a better position. The selfishness of this position sickens me, and anything that aids in nipping these tantrums in the bud has my enthusiastic support.
**>>BELCH
Um, Slashdot?