"Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere" - Paul Mason

[ed miliband]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason/2011/02/twenty_reasons_why_its_kicking.html

The twitter/facebook/cyberspace stuff is now a little laboured but he does bring up some good points.

[ckaihatsu]

7. Memes: "A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures." (Wikipedia) - so what happens is that ideas arise, are very quickly "market tested" and either take off, bubble under, insinuate themselves or if they are deemed no good they disappear. Ideas self-replicate like genes. Prior to the internet this theory (see Richard Dawkins, 1976) seemed an over-statement but you can now clearly trace the evolution of memes.


So soon we'll be saying goodbye to sentence structure altogether, maybe -- ?

How about autonomous, digital-equipped people merely gesturing and meme-ing in realtime to each other to make things happen fluidly, almost unconsciously -- ? We might *become* the packet-switching Internet devices that are our progeny, pulsing out packets of meaning that are immediately understood and ignored or acted upon according to present context...(!)

[Omi]

I think it presents a very clear view on a large part of our present day conditions. Yet I think it's a little to western centred. I don't think a large part of this applies to most of Asia, Africa and Latin America, though the tone of the article is that it encompasses a global phenomenon. Though I must admit a lot of it is pretty spread out, a lot of third world countries developed pretty large urban middle classes.

I do like that the writer had a lot of critique on it's own points. I agreed with a lot of it.

[Blackscare]

So soon we'll be saying goodbye to sentence structure altogether, maybe -- ?


It's ok, you can keep your asterisks :p

[bricolage]

He might be former Trot, now Keynesian but I properly rate Paul Mason, also as a side note everyone should read Live Working or Die Fighting.

I thought this blog was pretty interesting but I agree he over-hypes the technology stuff and I'd draw attention to this;

b) are these methods replicable by their opponents? Clearly up to a point they are. So the assumption in the global progressive movement that their values are aligned with that of the networked world may be wrong. Also we have yet to see what happens to all this social networking if a state ever seriously pulls the plug on the technology: switches the mobile network off, censors the internet, cyber-attacks the protesters.
The problem with technology, the internet, social media is that it is just a terrain and I don't really think it's necessarily prone to be conducive towards social change. He's written a bunch of stuff on it and Evgeny Morozov is really good on the 'dark' side of social media. For example how the Green Movement in Iran was praised as the first 'twitter revolution' but at the same time the internet was equally used by the state to splinter, slander and attack that same movement. I also see other problems such as how people tend to be bigger jerks hidden behind a computer screen and also how internet usage is still heavily concentrated in certain areas of the world;

‘We are for the technologies that allow us to connect with people more easily - cellphones, internet and so on. We like them. But the problem, is that the rich have access to these technologies - producing, selling and using them and so they are most often used against us (even though we do use them in our struggles too - especially cellphones and now that we have our own website too). We have to find a way to put these technologies in common so that they can be for everyone’.

You know what though seeing as he mentions Egypt one of my favourite things to happen was on Channel 4 news when they asked some people how they are communicating since facebook got shut down and someone replied, "we talk to each other in the street".

One more point...


d) what happens to this new, fluffy global zeitgeist when it runs up against the old-style hierarchical dictatorship in a death match, where the latter has about 300 Abrams tanks? We may be about to find out.
Coincidentally enough I saw him give an economics lecture on Monday and in it he addressed current protest movements. His comparison was to the Kanak revolt against the French Empire which was based around the idea of 'the white man promised us the heaven and the earth but delivered only bitterness'. The result of this was a suicidal revolt. His comparison was that the movements of today that he refers to in this piece follow a similar path where they don't really know what they are going for just know they are pissed off. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, fuck man we should all be pissed off and I'll bet any aims someone tries to attach to them would only sell them out. However his point was, and he used the example of Egypt was that if organised labour does not intervene then it will be settled between the state and the army. There's probably a lot of truth to this and anything solely confined to the streets is likely to be smashed off the streets.