Epeus' epigone

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Saturday, 1 April 2006

Unexpected agreement?

I've been saying for a while that the left/right split is often irrelevant to the politics around the net; it is much more about freedom and control, about trusting the public en masse or fearing them.
I have two illustrations of agreement across political lines tonight. First, danah boyd and Bill O'Reilly of Fox News in striking agreement over myspace.

Secondly, Tara Hunt's Marx-citing on marketing:
But re-reading the Communist Manifesto, I was, once again, swept up in the following passage:
When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. [...]

THE COMMONS WILL OWN THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION AND WILL CALL THE SHOTS. I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty rockin' to me. But then again, I have faith in human beings.

aligns with Mark Steyn and Glen Reynolds as cited in Steyn's review of Army of Davids:
The professor thinks we're in a transformative moment: "the triumph of personal technology over mass technology. . . . Starting around 1700, big organizations became the most efficient way to do a lot of things," he writes. But today, "economies of scope and scale" no longer favour the big, and those organizations that don't get it are like the old joke about the Pravda headline boasting that the Soviet Union made the biggest microchip in the world. "The empowerment of individuals," says Reynolds, "may lead to an interesting twist on Karl Marx's goal: workers control the means of production, all right, but it's a far cry from Communism."

That rang a vague bell with me and, after rootling through my mouldering clippings, I found an old column of mine from five years ago -- before Reynolds had started Instapundit or I'd even heard of "blogs." "We have arrived at the situation Marx and Engels urged upon us, in which the proletariat would rise up and seize control of the means of production," I wrote. "Their only mistake was that they were envisioning a workers committee running the local steel mill. But the steel mills have gone, and today the biggest industry in the United States is entertainment. That's the one the masses are kicking down the factory gates of."

It's not just media.
Posted by Kevin Marks at 01:48

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