platform
Differences
This shows you the differences between two versions of the page.
| Both sides previous revision Previous revision | Last revision Both sides next revision | ||
|
platform [2018/02/06 11:56] admin |
platform [2018/02/06 11:58] admin |
||
|---|---|---|---|
| Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
| - | ===== The Internet as a Planetary Platform ===== | + | **The Internet as a Planetary Platform** |
| - | [[testtoc]] | + | |
| The consensus among historians today that the Internet played an essential part in the 21st Century emergence of vast planetary movements strong enough to overthrow the dying capitalist world-system. But for a long time it was a contested arena and a two-edged sword.The abandoned step-child of the U.S. military network designed to survive atomic attack, it was taken up by university researchers, students, hackers and networks of anti-capitalist protesters around the globe. At the same time, governments and corporations began exploiting the technology for political surveillance and commercial exploitation, as we shall see below. (See "The Dark Side of the Internet" below. MAKE LINK) | The consensus among historians today that the Internet played an essential part in the 21st Century emergence of vast planetary movements strong enough to overthrow the dying capitalist world-system. But for a long time it was a contested arena and a two-edged sword.The abandoned step-child of the U.S. military network designed to survive atomic attack, it was taken up by university researchers, students, hackers and networks of anti-capitalist protesters around the globe. At the same time, governments and corporations began exploiting the technology for political surveillance and commercial exploitation, as we shall see below. (See "The Dark Side of the Internet" below. MAKE LINK) | ||
| Line 16: | Line 15: | ||
| 3. The Internet’s web-like global network, whose “center” is everywhere and nowhere, was turning out to be a more effective model for the emergence of planetary, democratic and working-class movements than the traditional hub-and-spokes, center/periphery, top-down model of centralized parties and “Internationals.” | 3. The Internet’s web-like global network, whose “center” is everywhere and nowhere, was turning out to be a more effective model for the emergence of planetary, democratic and working-class movements than the traditional hub-and-spokes, center/periphery, top-down model of centralized parties and “Internationals.” | ||
| - | ====Networked Democracy==== | + | =====Networked Democracy===== |
| Today, no one can deny the potential of online networking for revolutionary self-organization. The potential of the Web to enable new types of organization, based on the horizontal network model rather than the centralized hub-and-spokes model was less obvious a century ago. At the end of the 20th century, new forms of horizontal organizations began emerging in Latin America, rooted in urban neighborhoods and rural communities, in factories and on the land, yet networked nationally and even internationally. Self-organized, autonomous groups of peasants and indigenous peoples had been networking since 1992, when the Internet helped bring them together to celebrate 500 years of survival and resistance to colonialism. The symbolism of the woven web, powerful yet delicate, had already been proposed by activist women as an alternative to male-dominated, top-down power. | Today, no one can deny the potential of online networking for revolutionary self-organization. The potential of the Web to enable new types of organization, based on the horizontal network model rather than the centralized hub-and-spokes model was less obvious a century ago. At the end of the 20th century, new forms of horizontal organizations began emerging in Latin America, rooted in urban neighborhoods and rural communities, in factories and on the land, yet networked nationally and even internationally. Self-organized, autonomous groups of peasants and indigenous peoples had been networking since 1992, when the Internet helped bring them together to celebrate 500 years of survival and resistance to colonialism. The symbolism of the woven web, powerful yet delicate, had already been proposed by activist women as an alternative to male-dominated, top-down power. | ||
| Line 32: | Line 31: | ||
| Castoriadis’ vision of informed economic planning from below provided a concrete refutation of Nobel economist Friedrich Hayek’s anti-socialist argument that central planning is bound to fail because it cannot possibly assemble the information that is ultimately incorporated in the “marvel” of the price system which “registers the knowledge, the preferences, and values of countless people.” Castoriadis’ self-managed society also recalled Engels’ vision of the new world emerging out of the shell of the old – the image adopted in 1905 as the logo of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). What was original in 1958 was Castoriadis’ appropriation of the theories of the socialist-minded mathematician Norbert Weiner, the pioneer of computer science who explored the feedback principle and recognized the emergent quality of cybernetics – a word he coined. By the Millenium, not only cyberneticists but physicists, biologists, mathematicians, economists and scientists in other fields are studying and analyzing the emergent phenomena of spontaneous self-organization from below in the context of Chaos/Complexity/Emergence Theory. | Castoriadis’ vision of informed economic planning from below provided a concrete refutation of Nobel economist Friedrich Hayek’s anti-socialist argument that central planning is bound to fail because it cannot possibly assemble the information that is ultimately incorporated in the “marvel” of the price system which “registers the knowledge, the preferences, and values of countless people.” Castoriadis’ self-managed society also recalled Engels’ vision of the new world emerging out of the shell of the old – the image adopted in 1905 as the logo of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). What was original in 1958 was Castoriadis’ appropriation of the theories of the socialist-minded mathematician Norbert Weiner, the pioneer of computer science who explored the feedback principle and recognized the emergent quality of cybernetics – a word he coined. By the Millenium, not only cyberneticists but physicists, biologists, mathematicians, economists and scientists in other fields are studying and analyzing the emergent phenomena of spontaneous self-organization from below in the context of Chaos/Complexity/Emergence Theory. | ||
| - | ====Connectivity, Complexity, Emergence==== | + | =====Connectivity, Complexity, Emergence===== |
| + | |||
| + | ==== subheading ==== | ||
| Connectivity was the new factor that made actual the age-old dream of humanity rising together in the 21st century. In the late 20th century, sociologists demonstrated that there are only six degrees of separation between each of the then six billion humans on the planet. To be sure, these are weak connections, but it turned out that weak connections are the fabric that makes up the strength of complex network structures like the Internet, the physical universe (according to Quantum theory), and the human brain, with its billions of synapses. | Connectivity was the new factor that made actual the age-old dream of humanity rising together in the 21st century. In the late 20th century, sociologists demonstrated that there are only six degrees of separation between each of the then six billion humans on the planet. To be sure, these are weak connections, but it turned out that weak connections are the fabric that makes up the strength of complex network structures like the Internet, the physical universe (according to Quantum theory), and the human brain, with its billions of synapses. | ||
platform.txt · Last modified: 2018/02/06 12:00 by admin
Page Tools
Except where otherwise noted, content on this wiki is licensed under the following license: CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
