Dot-Communism Is Already Here

thanosk sends in a story at Wired Magazine about how online culture is, in many ways, trending toward communal behavior. Sharing and collaboration have become staples of active participation on the Internet, while not necessarily incorporating a particular ideology or involving a government. "Most people in the West, including myself, were indoctrinated with the notion that extending the power of individuals necessarily diminishes the power of the state, and vice versa. In practice, though, most polities socialize some resources and individualize others. Most free-market economies have socialized education, and even extremely socialized societies allow some private property. Rather than viewing technological socialism as one side of a zero-sum trade-off between free-market individualism and centralized authority, it can be seen as a cultural OS that elevates both the individual and the group at once. The largely unarticulated but intuitively understood goal of communitarian technology is this: to maximize both individual autonomy and the power of people working together. Thus, digital socialism can be viewed as a third way that renders irrelevant the old debates."

Comments

Re:Completely confused

[brian0918]

Sometimes it leads to collusion

I don't think that word means what you think it means... How can total volunteerism lead to anything forced, as through fraud or the violation of rights?

Which can also lead to progress.

That is no justification for the inherent violation of individual rights that comes with such actions, though. That is why free market capitalism is the only moral system.

capitalism also demands forced collaboration

Words have meanings, regardless of whether you choose to acknowledge them. Any examples you could label as "force" under capitalism would be restrictions on the violations of individual rights - ie, self-defense or government retaliation against force.

Re:He is describing Anarchism

[Hatta]

Indeed, few people recognize that one of Anarchism's greatest proponents was a leader in the International Workingmen's Association, along with Marx. Their political (but not economic) differences eventually led to a split in the International. And Bakunin predicted quite early that Marx's "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" would simply be a dictatorship. He best summed this up by saying, "Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice, socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality".