Dan Greene: Bad-faith question for good-faith purposes: What is your favorite example of relatively serious people explaining, seriously, that the Internet is a communist technology that will break all the rules of capitalism and subsequently capitalism itself?

Bad-faith question for good-faith purposes: What is your favorite example of relatively serious people explaining, seriously, that the Internet is a communist technology that will break all the rules of capitalism and subsequently capitalism itself?

I'm thinking especially of Hardt & Negri talking about the end of the law of value. But I'd even include a John Perry Barlow in here, as a sort of settler, libertarian communist.

H&N stuff aging like milk left out in the sun

Absolutely! But it was a real sentiment at a real point in history, about which I'm trying to write more.

even at the time my callow ass thought a lot of what they were doing could charitably be described as wishcasting out of a historical cul-de-sac

Perhaps elaborate on "relatively serious people"

Sorry, jinx

I find some of the 90s anthro stuff on internet subcultures unbearably "yeah, this sticks it to the man" in a Barlow theme. I'll dig out some references.

youtu.be/yJlO5yTVH_8?...

The Mask (2023)youtu.be story of a young man who loves Whos line is it anyway

Yochai Benkler as the left-liberal version of this?

Definitely, thanks

Did people actually argue this, given how capital intense the infrastructure is?

Yes. In part because the analysis starts and ends with the application layer.

Good grief. 😨🤢 Turning everything into software really does rot the brain. And these are presumably people who claimed to understand economics, right?

Ehhhh after the purges and the cultural turn, there was a real deficit of Marxists writing in English and able to talk about economics. Lots of bs got taken seriously, still does.

Not saying they did understand it, just wondering if they claimed to. And (white male) software folks love to speak with an unearned voice of authority about everything.

I guess I prefer to stick with historians, whether of a Marxist perspective or not, to any philosophers. The former is far more careful about extrapolation from case studies.

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