[John]
Peek at the future...
[Arlo]
Some thoughts and humor...
"It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart
centralization. It is decentralization extreme."
I think this is revealing of a form of self-regulated
anarcho-communism. But I think we need to see this piece as Googlezon
like telling, we are a long ways off from anything like this, and I
personally find it somewhat way to technodeterminist in many ways. (I
was humming "Age of Aquarius" while reading it, thinking how the
Hippies too had envisioned a decentralized, anarcho-communistic world).
"I recognize that the word socialism is bound to make many readers
twitch. It carries tremendous cultural baggage, as do the related
terms communal, communitarian, and collective."
This has been one of the more vile examples of manipulated language
in modern times. It ranks up there with "environmentalist".
"In the past, constructing an organization that exploited hierarchy
yet maximized collectivism was nearly impossible."
I think this is the key, that what is emerging is not one or the
other, but something else entirely. Peter Drucker has written (among
others) extensively on this, calling today's reality a
"post-capitalist society". In many ways the economic duality we are
often bombarded with (capitalism v. "communism") is already old news,
like arguing whether travel by zeppelin or steam-engine is better.
"In Post-Capitalist Society Peter Drucker describes how every few
hundred years a sharp transformation has taken place and greatly
affected society - its worldview, its basic values, its business and
economics, and its social and political structure. According to
Drucker, we are right in the middle of another time of radical
change, from the Age of Capitalism and the Nation-State to a
Knowledge Society and a Society of Organizations." (from publishers
abstract of Drucker's "Post-Capitalist Society").
"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."
Heresy! Heresy, I tell you!!
Am I to believe there is something other than the Glorious War
between the Heroic Lone Individual and the Malevolent Collective? No!
Say it isn't true!
"The new OS is neither the classic communism of centralized planning
without private property nor the undiluted chaos of a free market.
Instead, it is an emerging design space in which decentralized public
coordination can solve problems and create things that neither pure
communism nor pure capitalism can."
LALALALALA... I can't HEAR you!!!... LALALALALA
"Indeed, the leaders of the new socialism are extremely pragmatic."
I'm going to head off the nightmare crowd and point out that this
comment alone has a 93.4% projection to instigate allusions to
genocide, mass murder and eugenics, with a 78.2% possibility that Pol
Pot will be personally named.
"Consider craigslist. Just classified ads, right? But the site
amplified the handy community swap board to reach a regional
audience, enhanced it with pictures and real-time updates, and
suddenly became a national treasure. Operating without state funding
or control, connecting citizens directly to citizens, this mostly
free marketplace achieves social good at an efficiency that would
stagger any government or traditional corporation."
And what did the "free market" want? Hookers. Escort services. Porn.
So much so that the centralized authority had to intervene and demand
regulation. Now that I think about it, I didn't hear much squalking
about this violation of the free market in the traditional squalk channels.
"We underestimate the power of our tools to reshape our minds. Did we
really believe we could collaboratively build and inhabit virtual
worlds all day, every day, and not have it affect our perspective?"
This is a key point, and one that underlies theories growing out of
Vygotsky's work. "Mediation" is not "one-way", a "hammer" alters both
the nail and the hammerer. (And, for the hammerer, not just
conceptually but also, in a phylogenetic view, physiologically (which
includes neurally (don't you hate embedded parens?))).
On a related point, here is an except from David Weinberger's article
"Technology as a metaphor"
"Societies tend to understand what it is to be human in terms of the
technology they use every day. For example, when mechanical clocks
were invented, the universe started looking like a grand clockwork.
When steam engines transformed industry, we started understanding our
psyches in terms of various pressures, and we started to talk about
"venting." In the age of computers, we have inputs, process
information, and produce outputs." (Weinberger)
http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/Column/David-Weinberger/Technology-as-metaphor-9840.aspx
The modern "technology used every day" is networks, the Internet and
the WWW. Educational practices are also informed by this perspective,
which in turn draws heavily from the economic modes of production as
well. During the era of Fordist production, school rooms were neatly
organized rows with precise manuals for when and how the students
(factory workers) could act, the teacher (foreman) had his rules as
well, and "learning" was tidied up into very organized assembly lines
of controlled activity. Nowadays, in the "network" paradigm, the move
is open classrooms, with students (co-participants) sitting a circle
of open and unbounded participation with the teacher (also a
co-participant), and "learning" is exploratory and messy and "guided"
but not "directed". I should point out that this is hardly entirely
"new", its actually a partial "retrogressive" return (love
redundancies) to the open school rooms of pre-Fordist agrarian classrooms.
Oh, and there is a 89.7% probability that this though evokes cries of
"OMFG! Nihilism's coming! Run!!!" (or some variant of that theme).
There is a 32.4% probability that someone will lament the absence of
the "hickory stick", low, but I'd put some money on it.
Moq_Discuss mailing list
Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
Archives:
http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
