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

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Seize the State? Or, Let's Put on a Show! You Decide

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot:
[Y]ou could argue that public transportation would improve if everyone used it. Perhaps, but somebody has to start. It's like libre software. If you believe in p2p and creative commons as against proprietary products and corporate monopolies, you should be using Linux. But as long as very few people do, the software won't rival Photoshop and MS Office, giving people less incentive to switch. So, despite all the complaints, people stick with Windows out of convenience.

I think we need to destroy the legal and regulatory and funding regimes that encourage proprietary formations over p2p-formations, car culture over public transportation.

Screw spontaneist fantasies of the little people getting together and having a freesoftware party or green consumers buying feelgood hybrids because the tee vee tells them its the latest "thing" for a season -- all the while the state firehoses money and might to the incumbent-elite bad guys.

Fuck fantasies of a very special episode of Glee helping yuppies feel warm and fuzzy about insulating their attics with recycled denim (tho' you really should), when what is wanted is to seize the state and direct its might and money instead to the institution and maintenance of dense walkable neighborhoods connected by urban and transcontinental public mass transit and car-sharing programs.

Stop subsidizing ruinous petrochemical consumption to the short-term parochial benefit of incumbent-elites. Tax families with more than one car back to the stone age before they knock us all back to the Stone Age for real. Prioritize rapid rail over highways in state budgets. Re-orient Detroit into a wind-turbine industrial city. Turn urban roads into pedestrian malls. Stop sucking car culture cock as a nation before we're all fucked (and not in a good way).

And fuck this geek-leet pining for people to give up their windoze and jump on the linux bandwagon. Politics isn't a goddamn rave, temporary autonomous zones can't scale to accommodate the political realm. Howzabout: Dramatically widen fair use provisions, dramatically shrink the copyright term, give substantial public grants to knowledge-creation that is offered up to the public domain to render efforts sensibly worthwhile, make tenure a tradeoff contingent on non-commodification of university research.

By the way, a sensibly steeply progressive tax on income, including investment income, as well as property, could wholesomely re-capture the wealth all these sociopathic silicon-valley bazillionaires commandeered from the efforts of legions and generations of unpaid nerd enthusiasts which they then pretended they had created ab initio as if they were Ayn Randian wet-dream fountainhead archetypes rather than clueless narcissists just deluded and ruthless enough to confuse their own CEO-celebrity PR with reality.

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. And as sure as I'm sitting here it's only by reference to seizing control of the state and directing it to world-historical ends that one becomes a real political actor -- not through one's acts of consumption or kindness or beauty. This is not to denigrate everyday living or everyday miracles of kindness or beauty, but to grasp that p2p-democratization and sustainable polyculture are outcomes playing out in a different agentic-historical register than these.

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