This link has been bookmarked by 2 people . It was first bookmarked on 04 Jun 2009, by Jeremy Price.
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04 Jun 09
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But I think of socialism as something very specific. It’s something where a group of citizens pools their resources as part of a democratic (and at least partially technocratic) administering of benefits to everyone.
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if there’s no risk of something genuinely bad, no cost but opportunity cost, if all we’re doing is passing good things around to each other, then that, my friend, is not socialism.
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what we’re seeing emerge in the digital sphere is TOO altruistic to be socialism! There isn’t enough material benefit back to the individual. It’s not cynical enough! It solves no collective action problems! And again, it’s totally individualistic (yet totally compatible with collectivities), voluntarist (yet totally compatible with owning one’s own labor and being compensated for it), anti-statist (yet totally compatible with the state). It’s too pure in its intentions and impure in its structure.
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In fact, we have a word, a very old word, that precisely describes this impulse to band together into small groups, set collective criteria for excellence, and try to collect and disseminate the best, most useful, most edifying, most relevant bodies of knowledge as widely and as cheaply as possible, for the greatest possible benefit to the individual’s self-cultivation and to the preservation and enrichment of the culture as a whole.
And that word is humanism.
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Human beings are both deeply social and deeply particularized. There’s nothing particularly special about us. We’re one kind of life among many, many others, both on earth and in the universe.
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Humanism’s always characterized by this double bind, between antiquity and modernity, scholasticism and science.
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I LIKE the idea that humanism is born out of that uncertainty, that in-betweenness. To me, that feels like, well, now.
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What it does imply is 1) an ethos of self-criticism and 2) a desire to use ANY available technologies — social, scientific, or communicative — to disseminate knowledge as widely as possible. If there’s a motivating factor at all, it’s born out of this spirit of self-critique; we need to circulate this information, if we’re ever going to better understand an always-emergent modernity.
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there is no overcoming humanism, no leaving it behind.
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And when we lash out against bogey-man figures of socialism, really what we abhor is the rejection of humanism: the halt of information, the destruction of knowledge, the absence of that continued chain of self-critique and data transmission. That’s what we long for.
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The brain-and-gene humanists, like the religious humanists, can be very stone-age in their thinking. Human nature for both of these groups is real, and it’s fully determined by events that happened thousands of years ago. We’re hard-wired for everything — language, sex, and sin. And both groups hate the secular humanists - the culture people - for thinking that human beings are super-adaptable.
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Ultimately, the new digital humanism is more important than the new scientific humanism, because it really is a humanism. It actually more thoroughly rejects the naïve, universalizing humanism than the brains-and-genes crowd. It’s MORE compatible with what we’re finding out about how the brain works, how it processes information, and the complex interactions between language, culture, our bodies, and our DNA. And it more richly describes what is happening NOW than armchair postmodernism, evolutionism, or millenarianism. It positively gives us somewhere to go.
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People on the internet have been pushing the communitarian web utopia for a decades; this seemed like a little bit of a rehashed column for Kevin Kelley in between good technium posts.
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Everything has wildly fluctuating and inconsistent costs and benefits; any system using any sort of voluntary exchange to spread these around is going to be "capitalism." Coming up with new names like socialism or communitarianism just seems like cover for a lack of analysis.
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As for the humanism angle, I think this does a good job of stopping attempts at creating a fake debate
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02 Jun 09
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