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Re: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (Clay Shirky)
Brian Holmes
Oct 04, 2003 06:42 PDT
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Hello again - It would be churlish - in Grant's oh-so British phrase which makes me chuckle - to divert or hijack the discussion here into one concerning the concept of the multitudes. But that word can perhaps serve as one of the markers for the theme this list seeks to explore. In this respect I find John's bit of Americana very interesting:
John also talks about the precedence of the term "networkers" over what is now the everyday reality of "the average software designer or university professor" working over the net (to use another of Grant's well-turned phrases). In my observations, a key part of the 1960s American counter-culture movement, and one which also informed the technical development of the net, was the desire to overcome the alienation of large corporate organizations and statist disciplinary structures, with their extended, hierarchical chains of communication (or command). Thus the great 1960s theme of "community". Indeed, politics itself (according to a guy like Todd Gitlin who talks about these things in his book, The Sixties) became for many the struggle to re-create community: to resurrect Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft, as Tonnies would say (a German sociologist of a couple yesteryears back). Community can take form in the shared glint in the eye to which I referred before. It can even do so with a virtual glint, on the daunting scale of globalization, amidst which many of us seek some remote connection to compensate for our proximate alientation. So virtual communities arise, based on something other than the kind of "social" or gesellschaftlich tie constituted by money or by statist discipline. But then there come the scalar problems that have preoccupied someone like Geert Lovink over the last few years. In a much-remarked post to nettime, Geert said that the list was unable to metamorphose toward a larger scale, and so just stayed at the level of "an ordinary majordomo mailing list" (quote from memory). The implication - quite understandable from a political viewpoint, as we watch other aspects of the net rise to scales capable of really shaping the process of global integration - was that the bit of free cooperation called "nettime" is, to put it crudely, a failure, stuck at the level of an improbable and ultimately inconsequential community. If you just consider the above, you have the double problem we are talking about, which is also the problem addressed with the notion of the multitudes (which by the way Grant, I'd rather date back to Hobbes' use and definition of the word, than to the evangelizing Christians of which you speak). The first half of this problem is: what are the best social and technical devices (dispositifs) for giving rise to processes of cooperation, like nettime for instance? The second half is: how can these processes be extended to the point where they begin to address seriously, and not just in fantasy, the shortcomings and blockages which the dominant associational forms of the twentieth century - i.e. political party and corporation - have run up against? It would be nice to hear from more people about their microscale experiments - even if they are deliberatelly created to remain on a microscale... For the other discussion, networked activism has made attempts to overcome the scalar problem, obviously, because it's crucial in this area. Grant's skepticism is understandable in that regard, because there's a high degree of fantasy and sheer desire involved in networked activism, and also because the initial and dramatically experimental openings (Seattle...) have proven very susceptible to closure, notably by a barrage of black-and-white "with us or against us" messages coming from the broadcast media (after September 11...). Also, Grant can legitimately ask for programs, proposals, etc from the multitudinarians that would at least let one foresee workable alternatives to the present partisan or parliamentary form of democracy - alternatives that that would AT LEAST be as egalitarian and effective as the procedures we have now in the representative democracies (me too, I ask for 'em). Still the experiments are interesting. They take into account, not only "the average software designer or university professor" but also the larger reality of a world society saturated with information, where people working on all levels are confronted with the complexity of contemporary technical processes (as witnessed by anyone who's followed the many and increasingly networked peasant movements reacting against the imposition of GMOs or other forms of corporate-driven agriculture). Do the famous "six degrees of separation" which apparently make us ALL very close to each other in the (partially) networked world permit us to imagine, if not a new state-form, at least new social movements and new patterns of opinion-formation that might influence the way the existing state-form operates? Can so-called "weak ties" serve to jump the gaps between relatively close communities, and set up translation and circulation processes that allow new, large scale social formations to come into being - without these formations immediately foundering on the obstacle of scalar alienation? The latter question has motivated much of my own forays into free cooperation over the past few years. The other motivation has been the simple desire to meet people and even to goof off and play around a little - the way I must say I did in my off-the-wall and satirical "introductory" post to this list, at a point where the "technocratic" aspect of many people's intros was gettin on my nerves a little. OK, now we know each other's names, it's interesting to start talking about desires, techniques, concepts and experiences. This is getting good, thanks to all for the many different subjects being broached. best, Brian |
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