I was just watching the reports of the rolling Indian elections with their debate about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of exit polls, and thinking how technological developments in the last 20 years had brought into being much more inter-connectedness and a bourgeois civil society at least for some in a subcontinent as large as India.
Then I saw the intuitions by Bertold Brecht on the potentials of radio, except that the technological promise of what he imagined is only now coming out with the internet. We are indeed continuing to learn how to use this level of interconnectednss with blogs and Google. I pulled off the shelf an unthumbed paperback on "Connexity" by Geoff Mulgan, unthumbed because it seemed likely to be be too obvious, too diffuse and too bland. There is indeed no mention of class struggle, about which of course anarchists too are ambivalent. But p17 seems worth a quote: "Within a lifetime or two, if the technological futurists are to be believed, there may even be direct connections between people's minds, transcending the idea of separate selves and subjects. At the moment, some of the features of connexity appear to be relevant only for a privileged minority, and it is true that the thickest connections are experienced by only about a billion people, in North America and in Europe, Japan and the tiger economies of East Asia, and in the middle classes of China, India and Latin America." 1998 Vintage What happens when that degree of connectedness spreads to 50% of the world's population? When software keeps us in touch with the thousand people across the world, interdependence and cooperation with whom is most valuable to each of us? Monitoring renewing and refreshing our links on a continuous basis.Exchanging information and demanding transparency about every latest scandal of the ruling classes and every legal breach in the world by armed forces. Chris Burford
