Re: <nettime> Mechanical Turkish

On Sat, Jan 27, 2018 at 4:24 PM, Florian Cramer <flrncrmr@gmail.com> wrote:

None of the issues described in this write-up can be blamed on the corporate ownership of the currently popular social media. If people used Open Source, community-owned and community-run social media instead (like, for example, Mastodon or diaspora), there would be the same problems or worse.

This means that ownership and participation is no longer the central issue. Consequently, the media activism that began in the 1960s/70s - from the free radio and television to the tactical media movements to the advocacy of self-organized/autonomous networks - doesn't have answers to these questions.

Florian's remark is fundamental to the whole debate over social media. Progressive communications activism in the neoliberal period rested on the belief that mass participation in media divested of corporate and government gatekeepers would be liberatory. The individual would be free, or as some prefer to say, "sovereign." At least two questions were not asked. First, in the absence of gatekeepers, what would prevent other strategic actors from manipulating the flow of ideas and affects? And second, what exactly would be liberated?

In the fateful year of 2017 that marked the end of the neoliberal period, nothing prevented prevented the highly targeted manipulation of individuals who believed themelves to finally be free of organized censorship. What was liberated in the process were the atavistic drives of racism and nationalism that had dominated the mid-twentieth century.

The core question of a democratic society is not "how do I become free?" Rather it is "how do we govern ourselves?" Crucially that means: with which institutions, under which rules, backed by which constraints? If you do not answer these questions - as the entire anarcho-libertarian spectrum including myself did not, throughout the neoliberal period - well, then it turns out that others, like the Koch brothers or Cambridge Analytica, will attempt to answer it for you. What's more, in the course of that attempt, and as an integral part of it, they will unleash sleeping demons of mass society that even they cannot control.

The media activism of the neoliberal period was not all in vain. But it has achieved all it could. The urgent question today is how to create collective forms of democratic government for complex societies captivated by the myth of the sovereign individual.

It's time for a new cultural critique. The one we greybeards practiced is obsolete.

best, Brian