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

Monday, December 06, 2010

Keyboard Kommandos of the Left

To declare oneself more radical politically than Democratic Party skirmishing affords in this moment, but then to waste time whining about Obama rather than, say, supporting Julian Assange seems to me a patent register of the narcissism of so many of the would-be radical naysayers who occasionally loiter discontentedly in the Moot. Obama is certainly not a revolutionary, but neither did he ever claim to be -- whereas Assange, it seems to me, is the face of something potentially quite revolutionary indeed. (More on this to come.) To whine about Obama or Reid (about both of whom there is obviously plenty to complain) is to confine yourself already to the horizon of the partisan political imaginary -- and once there it really does seem to me to be absurd to primp and boast about one's greater or lesser radicality with pragmatists trying (even when they fail) to find pathways to piecemeal reforms within existing constraints. Those who propose Democratic and Republican equivalences or who succumb to the spoiler-lure of Third Party irrelevancies seem to me little better than the most fulminating right wing ideologues in terms of their practical progressive political impact. If you would fancy yourself a revolutionary (as I personally do not, but I will admit I greet insurrections with a joy I cannot constrain even as my convictions finally argue against most of them), then you should be organizing marches in your town of and for the unemployed, you should be guerilla gardening and despoiling public ad-copy, you should be supporting Wikileaks with money and bandwidth, you should be taking risks that might land you in jail. If you disdain the extremes of the revolutionary, there are good reasons for that, and if you disdain the inadequacies of partisan reformism, there are good reasons for that as well, but if you indulge in making a spectacle of your disdain for the substance of both and then roll your eyes at the world's failure to equal your radicalism, you really must forgive me when I say there is no reason to take you the least bit seriously, and that you are far worse than the usual American idiot who disdain the political altogether as well, because you probably know enough to know better.

1 comment:

jollyspaniard said...

Assange has just turned himself in and he's been denied bail. Although I imagine you'll hear about that yourself when you wake up as it's all over the news.

I'm hoping that he gets through this unscathed but I'm not sure he will. He certainly seems to have burst some kind of bubble and to have shine a light on how our governments can push back against free speech and journalism.

It's especialy telling how corporations like Amazon and Paypal can be pressured to do the governments bidding. These are the companies we're supposed to trust with all our private affairs when they're all administered in the cloud? That paticular rose has been revealed to have a few thorns.

A lot of the institutions we have placed trust in to be inviolate have been exposed to be malleable and corruptible. Not just by the leaks but also in response to the leaks as well.