Trying to consolidate some meditations on the loose web of topics that I’m interested in right now. I have a very evasive sense that there’s some coherent thread to be pulled on across it all, but currently all I see are many different threads of enquiry racing off. As is often the case, distilling the problem clearly feels like it will be the first big step to a solution.
A ‘mood board’ of those many racing threads:
- A theory of our information (post-)capitalism that really resonates (see ‘Capital is Dead’ on Marx’ revolutionary act of describing his present).
- The historical junction where democratising, emancipatory concepts of the internet failed to materialise, and were defeated by the centralised client-server patterns that have entrenched as Big Tech monopolies.
- It feels like this junction was somewhere in the 90s - although it’s worth asking whether it was real at all, or a post-facto myth of what could have been.
- The possibilities for privacy-first/local-first/peer-to-peer movements to revive that vision today.
- The tension among climate progressives between ‘eco-modernism’, broadly terming the liberal vision of abundance from green growth; and the ‘degrowth’ vision of a world focused on “enough” not “more”, and the necessity of getting there.
- my current perception is that the former is a dangerous kind of reformism, that provides cover for ineffective action here and now. One could argue whether that ineffective action is a corruption of the abundance vision, or just its true form.
- however, I want to remain open to the intellectual question of the merits of these two approaches.
- Historical examples of resistance to these eternal-growth philosophies in defense of a humanist vision.
- Central planning; NEP; late Soviet/Maoist failures, perversions & disasters; Stafford Beer & 70s cybernetic attempts; modern possibilities.
I can attempt to read something coherent from these scattered bones. What has happened to the world? Specifically, how has the eruption of Big Tech within capitalism changed it? What other paths were possible? And therefore, what might be the path out?