My mom still reads news on an ancient technology called “paper” collected together into a “magazine.” I’m told that it’s similar to printing a blog. Don’t ask me how that’s efficient. Anyhow, she suggested I read a Wired article: The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online by Keven Kelly. She even politely offered to send it to me via snail mail if I couldn’t find it online. How quaint.
The article certainly references the major league players of my generation – Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Creative Commons, the Pirate Party, et al, but it’s aimed at my mother’s generation.
Quoth Kelly:
I use socialism because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions. Broadly, collective action is what Web sites and Net-connected apps generate when they harness input from the global audience. Of course, there’s rhetorical danger in lumping so many types of organization under such an inflammatory heading. But there are no unsoiled terms available, so we might as well redeem this one.
There certainly are unsoiled terms waiting to be created, but if we insist on using an existing term, “socialism” is a strange one to attach to internet culture.
Quoth Wikipedia:
Socialism refers to any one of various theories of economic organization advocating state or cooperative ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of B.S., and a society characterized by equal opportunities/means for all individuals with a more egalitarian method of compensation based on the full product of the laborer.
The internet culture to which Kelly refers has little “cooperative ownership” and less “compensation.” If we insist on comparing internet culture to a system of state governance, benevolent anarchy might be a more suitable fit.
But if you talk to people who are enmeshed in internet culture, who spend hours editing Wikipedia, and producing articles (like this one) intended to go directly into the public domain, you will find that we don’t use the terms socialism or anarchy to describe our culture. This is a Revolution.
What Keven Kelly fails to grasp is that this is not the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice; this is not a logical progression from Paine and Marx, as his cute infographics would suggest. This is an irreversible shift in the way that humanity understands and interacts with itself. Internet culture is like nothing we have seen before in human behavior.
All generations, I know, would believe that they are New and Different, but consider Iran. What other American generation has watched, hands to hearts, breaths collectively held, hours of footage, hundreds of pictures, thousands of tweets coming in real time from individual citizens on the other side of the planet? What other generation has interacted with itself in this way? People under 30 all over the globe are donning their green ribbons and wrist bands, because this isn’t about politics (mostly). It’s about Revolution.
Internet culture has brought Generation Y together across all borders. Some of us are passionate about unalienated labor and free rational inquiry, but most of us have never read about them. Most of us were simply taught that sharing and helping is the right thing to do. Our generation is the first to have been given the incredible means to publish worldwide instantly. So the question of whether we can help humanity isn’t an overwhelming and daunting one as it was to our parents, it’s a question of whether we have five minutes to hop on Wikipedia and contribute some research. It just so happens that sharing and helping on a global scale can tear down dictatorships, expose corruption, and heal a planet that for too long has suffered from division and misinformation.
In short, while Mr. Kelly is right that there are elements of socialism woven into the fabric of the internet, its bedrock is Revolution.
