[MD] The New Socialism - Wired Magazine

[Arlo Bensinger]

[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.