Products for Revolutionaries #5: Social Networking, Collaborative Working
In communism there is no fixed specialisation of human beings. As speakers of language we are already communists. Language is made by all and belongs to all. It has no external authority or "state", and no hierarchy. In the mercantile cities of Italy that challenged a thousand years of feudalised fixed human categories, the idea of a "universal man" (uomo universale) arose. The most complete one was Leon Battista Alberti and the most famous was Leonardo da Vinci. Karl Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto that the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. As commodities of labour-power for sale, workers are caught halfway between feudalism and communism. It is their commodification by the bourgeoisie that enslaves them. Yet individual specialism appears to increase their value in the capitalist market place. Workers are the most technically advanced part of society but they can be found defending old categories against new technology. This distortion is caused by capitalism. Computers are the first truly universal work-machines since hammers were used by apes. The hammer and the word have come together in the computer. The beneficial, residual virus of communistic language has metastasized and materialised into the undifferentiated, unhierarchical communistic work-tool, the computer, and its software. This process happened in our time and it is not yet complete. Computers connected by the Internet, without any conspiracy, virtue or vice, subvert the received categories of labour-power commodity. Anyone can do anything. There are no more experts. Anyone can be an analyst, writer, auteur or demiurge. The universal man and the universal woman walk on to the stage of history once again, and are confronted once again by fading fixed categories still maintained by force, custom, habit and reactionary vested interests. The question is not now: "Who can?" but only: "Who will?", or, more so: "Who decides?" Democracy and technology coincide and new products are put into the hands of revolutionaries. How does this work? Where does it happen? Here are some more examples: <http://www.facebook.com/> Facebook: a stateless social networking system. <http://twitter.com/> Twitter: an instant, unbounded concise dialoguing tool. <https://www.blogger.com/start> Blogs (web logs): open letters and reports to the world, with open comment space. <http://groups.google.com/> Google Groups: unlimited one-to-many and many-to-many correspondence systems <http://www.wikispaces.com/> Wikis: collaborative work-systems in universal space harnessing unlimited contributions from unlimited numbers of individuals in a single workpiece. UomoVitruvio --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] . -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
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