Amerika

Keith Kahn-Harris really hits the nail on the head:

The democratising possibilities of the internet are in the process of speeding the degeneration of the public sphere into a proliferation of insular nodes, each fighting a war that can never be won. Battles cannot be won on the net nor can they be lost. What remains is a solipsistic politics of ME, ME, ME: my views, my truths, my facts, my pain, my anger. Convincing others and changing the world is forgotten in favour of the perpetuation of one’s own perspective.

It would be a mistake to look back at politics before the internet age as a prelapsarian idyll. But new realities create new problems as well as solving old ones. What is needed is a political model that can beging to redress the rise of solipsistic micropolitics; one that emphasises connection, self-critique and cool, considered analysis. What is needed is a different kind of technology that retains the internet’s openness to participation but without the tendency to push activists and driven individuals towards self-righteous isolation.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the-politics-of-me-me-me

He ends up calling for new tools, which is where I leave off from his thesis: what we need are not external tools, but internal self-discipline and possibly, a level of edited discourse where only sane comments are allowed.

Tags: democratizing, internet, keith kahn-harris, self-discipline