nettime: CYBERSPACE

[pit@uropax.contrib.de (Pit Schultz)]

Return-Path: <morgan.garwood@thing.nyc.ny.us>
Date: Sat, 17 Feb 96 16:41:05
Subject: NETTIME: CYBERSPACE
To: owner-nettime-l@desk.nl

well, okay, sorta... but we also must be careful to take note when we are
"reading back" our contemporary values and understandings of a just society
into a time, such as the one occupied by Washinton, Jefferson, Madison, et al.
which, in reality, had less history to "learn from" than we do today. Imagine
the absurdity of politics pre-suffrage, utterly male dominated (and justified
through specious bilogical reasoning), yet steps toward a universal vote were
only effective in the 20th century. Does that then invalidate all political
thought and expression by males prior to women getting the vote ? Similarly, I
believe that asserting that because these persons were slaveholders, therefore
they were incapble of insightful or progressive expression (within the context
of their times), simply flies in the face of reason. What you are actually
practicing is an intellectual brand of class-racism all your own (see
Volkogonov on Lenin's, and Leninist thought and its own forms of class-racism
masquerading a dialectical-materialist analysis, when in actuality what was
being practiced, and encouraged, only to be handed over to his moral heir,
Dzugashvili, a/k/a the man of steel, Mr. Stalin, was "Blanquism", or the
terror-state). To assume that Mr. Barlow's newfound political domain is somehow
predicated on a slaveholding mentality, constitutes the New Plantation, and
will spell the exploitation of the "masses" by a HiTek few does not comport
with thhe facts. Politics are becoming more opened to free discussion, closed
professions are more easily scrutinized, and I think we are enjoying a shift
from the theatre of politics to a newfound politics of substance, precisely
thanks to the internet.
  HOWEVER, as we have discussed before, there are dark countertrends which can
all too easily be swept under the rug in our rush to modernize... such as the
explosive growth of public "gaming", the godawful badness of our public school
system, and technologically miraculous ShitKultur for the Dumbos.
  HOWEVER #2, if anything on the horizon has the leverage to rectify this state
of affairs, and return the control of political, social, cultural discourse to
the people who partake of it, is the very system you are disseminating your
opinions on at this very minute, without which we would never have heard of
each other, much less known of each other's opinions.
--
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