Comments on: Does the Hive Mind need Guidance? http://www.boilbeforedrinking.com/2008/02/does-the-hive-mind-need-guidance.html Watching... Sat, 06 Sep 2008 16:52:26 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.3.2 By: Ninja Man: With Ninja Powers! http://www.boilbeforedrinking.com/2008/02/does-the-hive-mind-need-guidance.html#comment-96 Ninja Man: With Ninja Powers! Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:03:00 +0000 http://www.boilbeforedrinking.com/2008/02/does-the-hive-mind-need-guidance.html#comment-96 Seems like he used a lotta words to make a simple point: individual attention and consciousness is required in order to produce meaning from a sea of boundless, decontextualized information. This is what the wikipedia "elite" do very well. This is what any interesting project does, people (yes, we still need them), ask other people for help, and she with the most interest tends toward shaping the project with the assistance of others. Hardly a ground breaking thought, but as he admits this profound "insight" is really just him talking to himself and others like him who tend toward seeing every trend in technological consumerism as an earth-shattering and world changing development.<br/><br/>I agree that writing like this sounds a little too sure of itself. Especially when throwing out evolutionary metaphors, this guy sounds like a thinly veiled apologist for predatory capitalism and oppressive social/belief structure (top-down "control" = TINA) in order to "lift up" the "crap at the bottom" (you could even look into the spatial metaphors used and ask why we always imagine things as top/bottom or up/down and what kind of effects this sort of thinking has). <br/><br/>The so-called "california ideology" is a weird mix of neo-liberalism, "hippie" lifestyle, and a severe case of technophilia. These are the consumer utopia brought to you by computing crowd. Democrats who voted for Reagan. The language in this article really quite typical of the arrogance and self-righteousness of the Western technological elites - cocksure hyper-rationalist hubris (i.e. our technological 'mastery' of our self-constructed bubbles of experience means we have nothing to learn from anyone for purposes other than our own)<br/><br/>So, the root of all this bottom up/top down shit is not whether or not "the bottom" needs "the top" or vice-versa. Rather, it should be a challenge to the authoritarian impulse to declare how and why information is considered (ill)legitimate or (in)appropriate and why this so. The instrumental rationality so loved by the techno-futurists is an unbalanced and totalitarian episteme and is directly accountable for the kind of "soft fascism" that already exists and is ever growing in the West"<br/><br/>In other words: You don't everything you assholes, so stop acting like you do. Seems like he used a lotta words to make a simple point: individual attention and consciousness is required in order to produce meaning from a sea of boundless, decontextualized information. This is what the wikipedia “elite” do very well. This is what any interesting project does, people (yes, we still need them), ask other people for help, and she with the most interest tends toward shaping the project with the assistance of others. Hardly a ground breaking thought, but as he admits this profound “insight” is really just him talking to himself and others like him who tend toward seeing every trend in technological consumerism as an earth-shattering and world changing development.

I agree that writing like this sounds a little too sure of itself. Especially when throwing out evolutionary metaphors, this guy sounds like a thinly veiled apologist for predatory capitalism and oppressive social/belief structure (top-down “control” = TINA) in order to “lift up” the “crap at the bottom” (you could even look into the spatial metaphors used and ask why we always imagine things as top/bottom or up/down and what kind of effects this sort of thinking has).

The so-called “california ideology” is a weird mix of neo-liberalism, “hippie” lifestyle, and a severe case of technophilia. These are the consumer utopia brought to you by computing crowd. Democrats who voted for Reagan. The language in this article really quite typical of the arrogance and self-righteousness of the Western technological elites - cocksure hyper-rationalist hubris (i.e. our technological ‘mastery’ of our self-constructed bubbles of experience means we have nothing to learn from anyone for purposes other than our own)

So, the root of all this bottom up/top down shit is not whether or not “the bottom” needs “the top” or vice-versa. Rather, it should be a challenge to the authoritarian impulse to declare how and why information is considered (ill)legitimate or (in)appropriate and why this so. The instrumental rationality so loved by the techno-futurists is an unbalanced and totalitarian episteme and is directly accountable for the kind of “soft fascism” that already exists and is ever growing in the West”

In other words: You don’t everything you assholes, so stop acting like you do.

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