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

Sunday, December 04, 2016

A Cascadian Thread (Expanded and Edited)

By the way, happy to include NV if NV wants to be included.
I am thinking here especially about compacts for increasing and improving healthcare access (as vile Republicans seek to dismantle the ACA, Medicare, and Medicaid) regulations for sustainable manufacturing and investments in sustainable energy and transportation infrastructure, soil and freshwater and forest restoration, a living wage, paid family leave, accountable community policing, commonsense gun safety laws, sanctuary cities and campuses, free community college and student loan debt relief, paid family leave, for example. If Republicans finally manage to fulfill their ugly pointless dream of destroying the postal service, by the way, Cascadia should subsidize ours and let them provide low cost non-exploitative community banking services as well.
That should be: "If a neo-Confederate rump of white-supremacists can drag the whole country down, then surely with a conscious effort a thriving multicultural social democracy can drag it kicking and screaming into a sustainable progressive future!" The number of typos I both produced and then overlooked in those two tweets is a bit confounding -- I attribute it to the exasperation I felt at the moment I tapped them up, I suppose?
To counter the too successful re-branding via "Tech" of serially failed Republican schemes -- deregulation as "disruption," financial fraud as "the New economy" or "digitization," feudal sharecropping labor as "the sharing economy," surveillance and harassment as "personalization" and "openness," precarization as "acceleration," deceptive and hyperbolic marketing discourse as "thought leadership," upward failure and repackaging as "innovation," discriminatory employment practices as "culturefit" and so on -- Cascadia should insist on the application of regulations ensuring equity-in-diversity in traditional industries to so-called "disrupted" ones (like rental properties, taxicabs, publications) as well as subsidize the maintenance of social networking platforms that function as public goods (blogging/microblogging/mediasharing/archives), rendering their public service immune to concerns for profitability that presently encourage surveillance, harassment, abuse, and mis-information in these spaces. This is the sort of thing I write about on this blog more generally, of course, when partisan politics aren't obsessing me. If you want to understand why California is particularly susceptible to reactionary "Tech" rhetoric, you can scarcely make a better beginning than reading Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, The Californian Ideology, now over twenty years old!

2 comments:

Lorraine said...

If Republicans finally manage to fulfill their ugly pointless dream of destroying the postal service, by the way, Cascadia should subsidize ours and let them provide low cost non-exploitative community banking services as well.

Kind of reminds me of a book I once read.

"If a neo-Confederate rump of white-supremacists can drag the whole country down, then surely with a conscious effort a thriving multicultural social democracy can drag it kicking and screaming into a sustainable progressive future!"

That would be the Holnists.

Dale Carrico said...

Brin's societies are so transparent.