Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Sunday, April 06, 2008

The Retro-Futurist "Revolutionaries"

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot -- h/t Seth.

Most of the parochial visions of "the future" after which superlative technocentrics pine and for which they would eagerly substitute the pleasures and dangers of open futurity, peer-to-peer, finally amount to the conjuration of sweeping transformation at the level of alluring surface details, but always in ways that leave intact all sorts of key reactionary right-wing status quo assumptions about "liberty" as consumption from a menu provided by elites, "competition" as market exchange however duressed, "innovation" as looting of the commons, "value" as price, "endless expansion" as an iron law rather than an offense to logic and common sense, "value-maximization" as a model of rationality even though it is actually a recipe for insanity, and so on.

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