

Deserting the Digital Utopia - delete_me
http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/ex/digital-utopia.html

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sanoli
"It is a mistake to think that the tools built to rule us would serve us if
only we could depose our masters. That’s the same mistake every previous
revolution has made about police, courts, and prisons." Like all my anarchist
friends, who say they'd like to do away with all those institutions when their
revolution happens, but is never able to explain to me how, actually, their
perfect society would work when some form of repression is needed. "There
wouldn't be a need for repression" doesn't cut it, you know.

~~~
x4y3io
You say that some form of repression is needed. It seems there is a divergence
here. To put it in the words of another:

"If we anarchists are utopians, we are so as a tension towards quality; if
democrats are utopians, they are so as a reduction towards quantity. And
against reduction, against the atrophy lived in a dimension of the minimum
possible damage for them and the maximum damage for the great number of people
who are exploited, to this miserable reality we oppose our utopia which is at
least a utopia of quality, a tension towards another future, one that will be
radically different to what we are living now."

The need for repression obvious if you are a member of the emergent cybernetic
bourgeoisie. Black hat hackers, terrorists, computer illiteracy, government
regulation, and anarchists all threaten your material conditions for existence
and your quantitative conceptual framework. The cyber-liberals will support
political projects as long as they don't interfere with their business or
threaten their position of power and privilege. John Stewart summed up this
attitude when he said of Occupy:

"Look, if this thing devolves into throwing trash cans into Starbucks windows,
nobody's going to be down with that..."

tl;dr - It's not about creating a perfect society, it's about destroying the
shitty one we have. Of course you're not down with that if you wanna be the
next Steve Jobs.

