Slashdot Mirror
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."
Sharing ideas freely and collaborating is not communism, is this statement clear enough? In the retrospect I should have used "communist" to make it clear for people with IQ in two digits.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
You're not getting it. The "culture of individual empowerment" is nothing more than spin. You could take almost any culture and spin it to be pro-individual. An obvious example is copyright law. The US is pro-individual: IP is privately owned, so the individual can dictate their terms of use. But the US is anti-individual too: you are less free to make use of others' works, which hampers the individual's potential. You end up arguing yourself in circles.
Likewise, the "big brother" notion is about as ingrained in US culture as anything else. The Puritans certainly subscribed to "big brother" style restrictions. All Native American factions have been exposed to extreme government oppression that only ended relatively recently. (Incidentally, assimilation programs ended at about the time you claim we were importing ideas from socialist countries.) Every state in the union has laws codifying bizarre moral proscriptions, with the most bizarre ones coming from over a century ago. Again, all of these restrictions can be seen as empowering the individual: by making your neighbors moral and protecting you from savages. It is not a fruitful line of inquiry.
Don't mind ShieldW0lf. To him, anything that's American in origin must automatically be bad, and any post-facto excuse to see it as such, no matter how flimsy, will satisfy him. Which ironically makes his outlook a lot like those comics he claims to hate.