<nettime> social media & political activism redux

["michael gurstein" <gurstein@gmail.com>]

A problem with all of this is that the ???hand???s off the Internet??? position is at the very core of a neo-liberal take down of the social contract.  The Internet erodes local tax bases, shifts wealth from the poor to the rich, from poor countries to rich ones; and the rallying cry for oppositional elements is ???hand???s off????

 
Of course, there were particularly obnoxious elements to this tax and especially with this government but how to shift the discourse in the streets away from a libertarian anti-governmentalist, anti-tax, anti-regulation position to a positive/pro-active one that recognizes the transformational impact of the Internet including in areas impacting social justice.

Mike


-----Original Message-----

From: nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org [mailto:nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org] On Behalf Of Geert Lovink

Sent: Saturday, November 01, 2014 6:34 AM

To: nettime-l@kein.org

Subject: Re: <nettime> social media & political activism redux


Thanks a lot, Allan, this is interesting. The question imho is not how social media relate to the inadequate responses of political parties but if they will generate sustainable 'new institutional forms' over time. What if the current social media only produce one-off events? Protests without a cause? The social in these cases then gets reduced to the self-mirroring of the masses on the streets. That's old school spectacle and has remarkably little to do with the capacity of these social media to network, organize, debate. Mass mobilization these days disappears very fast, so fast that even the most involved insiders are baffled. I personally do not think this has much to do with the 'absence' of leadership and the absence of an avant-garde (and their artists). Politics, our politics, have become submitted to the same laws that rule everywhere: the law of the meme, in this case. Geert

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