Scrawled in Wax

Put in another, far more hyperbolic way: will Julia Allison kill the potential of the Web?

Back when the internet was still called the ‘information superhighway’, utopian visions reigned supreme. You remember them: the internet would change everything, ushering in a brave new world that would revolutionise all facets of our lives from purchasing to the political process. Funnily enough, in many ways the hyperbole turned out to be true; things are remarkably different. Yet at the same time, few of us could have imagined how quickly the internet would lose its Edenic sheen and become so quickly dominated by large corporations, blog snark and the intense individualism we once associated with the 1980s.

But despite the prominence of ‘oversharing’, commenter culture and consumerism, people are still thinking about how the ‘net may elicit more fundamental and wide-ranging changes in culture. I’m a bit late to this, but take Douglas Rushkoff’s talk at the Personal Democracy Forum. It is a truly remarkable piece, well worth the read and you might even find it – dare I say – inspirational.

Rushkoff focuses on what I suppose you could call the epistemological ramifications of the internet as both an evolution of media and also an entirely new medium/social tool – that rather than thinking about ‘how the music biz is changing’, we should instead engage how the structures that organise our life might react and change in response to the Web. He begins in a refreshing place: the historical production of the individual through Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophy and what he deems to be the false equation of individualism and democracy.

In contrast, he proposes that the network of the internet allows for democracy to be the mobilization of collective – rather than aggregated individual – action. I think what’s great about the idea is that thinks of group action as provisional, temporary and always plural – about selflessness and personal responsibility rather than the the self-interest that governs the current capitalist-democratic model.

But what is also key is his attempt at an anti-ideological approach – to refute the top-down idea in which an ideology is propagated by leaders and then enacted by followers. The network allows spontaneous, democratic reaction by small or large groups that enact change by, well, acting. It is, in parts, naive – what, after all, would ideology-free behaviour look like? Still – that does little to diminish the power of the idea and its radical challenge to democratic-capitalist structures of power. Rather than a text or repository of political ideas, a central, elevated pivot around which action moves, the internet is instead seen as the network by and through which personal action becomes collective action, which in turn becomes political and social change.

But this vision of what the internet might be stands in stark contrast to the contemporary web. Indeed, recent discussions about oversharing and commenter culture speak to a Web in which collective action is almost completely overshadowed by the individual. ‘Commenter culture‘ in particular is often about the performance of individual cultural capital, one-upmanship and the relentless push to bring down a blogger/writer with a witty, snarky and reductively pithy statement.

Much of the current internet is, rather than a new collectivist utopia, an intense concentration of the individualism and narcissism so many have associated with the fragmentation and alienation of late-capitalist culture. The question to be asked then is whether or not perspectives like Rushkoff’s will be drowned out by the culture of oversharing or whether the two can co-exist – perhaps even, counter-intuitively, complementing each other. I am not entirely sure how that might happen. I guess it’s just a question for anyone who happens to read this.

As I have argued incessantly, the internet is not simply an evolution of technology. It represents a fundamental epistemological shift. But is the current direction of (North American) ‘net culture capitalising on the potential of a persistent, easily accessibly public space? Or is the emphasis on monetary gain, microfame and the projection of the individual self – all of which one might sum up by using the term ‘Julia Allison‘ – strangling the revolutionary potential of the world’s most powerful socio-political tool?

Hit the comments and let me know what you think.