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

Saturday, May 14, 2011

The Assimilation of Peer to Peer Discourse to the Anti-Democratizing Politics of the Status Quo

Peer to peer discourse coming from the left is by now almost fatally undermined as a source for substantial resistance to the prevalent right in my view due to its near suffusion with spontaneist, anarchic, libertopian conceits.

At this point, the corporate-militarist neoliberal/neoconservative global developmentalist status quo -- framed and rationalized in general as a spontaneous market order and by its chief beneficiaries among incumbent elites via the usual reactionary moralisms and technocratic pieties -- confronts in the chief theories (both popular and critical) of insurgent peer-to-peer networked formations a perfectly congenial sponaneist-libertopian mirror image and in actual practice literally ever more of the same incumbent-elite or elite-in-training faces, the entrepreneurs and official intellectuals stress-managing authoritarian order.

Peer-to-peer formations are at risk of assimilation to the status quo, are at risk of failing to do their democratizing work educating, agitating, organizing resistance to authoritarian plutocracy and implementing scenes of equity-in-diversity. Intellectuals of peer-to-peer formations seem to me to be failing to grasp these risks -- and as often as not now function to market and promote this assimilation as if it were resistance -- and for the most part fail even to grasp the promise they are betraying.

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