[P2P-F] Net Delusion review

Thu Feb 3 16:03:53 CET 2011

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/01/delusions-aside-the-nets-potential-is-real/69370/

Zeynep:

“But I disagree that the reason online protests do not work is that they are
online, or they are easy. The reality, at this juncture in history, is that
nothing really works. The Internet is not the problem; global citizen
disempowerement is. It’s not the technology that is failing politics but it
is
our politics that has failed. …
Political activism is not failing because people are too busy watching cat
videos online, but because of a fundamental collapse of citizen leverage on
institutions of power like governments and corporations. I find it ironic
that,
after correctly warning about the dangers of an Internet-centric worldview
in
which everything is perceived through the prism of the Net, Morozov himself
is
caught in a net-centric analysis of political activism’s decline.

If surveillance, censorship and propaganda are the three pillars of
authoritarianism, information, organization and leverage are the
counter-pillars
of citizen power. And the Internet provides the best and most appropriate
infrastructure for strengthening all three. Morozov correctly claims that it
does not do so in an unmitigated manner but unmitigated is not the same as
ineffective or irrelevant.

In this regard, the Internet is the greatest antidote to anti-communitarian
forces. Frankly, I find even the most mindless lolcat sites on the Internet
to
be an improvement over canned-laughter-filled sitcoms. The point of lolcats
is
not the lolcats themselves, but to share them with friends, comment on them,
make more of them, and enter the community via the joke. It’s the community,
not
the cat, that matters. (If you doubt this, try selling a book of lolcats and
see
how well it does.) I write this review in the aftermath of an atrocity; the
assassination attempt in Arizona on a Congresswoman that claimed the lives
of
six others including a child. Every Internet community I am part of is
roiled
and there is widespread discussion on most of them about the event. Fifteen
years ago, we’d all be watching TV, not communicating with each other.”
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