Writing, from here on out
Not to long ago I begun writing here, but for the longest time it felt more like sketching and idea than producing a coherent thread. Now that I have (somewhat) maturated, my thoughts have begun to settle. I now have a more concise idea or were I’m going with all of this. In as brief of a sentence as I can put it, I want to change the way that we organize cyberspace. This Blog has been an attempt to entertain the idea than an online society can be just as complex and as worthy of change and criticism as any other type of society.
People are critical of their surroundings, maybe for cynical reasons or self interests, but we remain critical nonetheless. However on online discourse we find ourselves heavily mediated by digital media itself. To have a complete thought on Twitter is synonymous with lunacy; look at that crazy guy with a thread of 8 tweets in a row! Is he insane or part of a conspiracy theory? The mechanisms of social media, and the internet as a whole, create a predetermined path, a default mode of discourse. Where users just ‘play out’ their assigned position. In this way, to call the creators of cyberspace “the programmers” is true in a more literal sense. On the other hand the people of the Net are not to be referred to the users, for they are not simply using tools but being used or acted upon by the tools and programs they pretend to use. In a more dialectical fashion, cyberspace is divided by two classes with opposing interests: The Programmers and the Programmed, the Users and the Used, the platform monarchs and the digital slaves, the creator and the creation. In no amount of words I can come close to paint a detailed enough picture of the cybernetic-landscape, but whatever method of analysis we apply on digital society we cannot ignore the elephant in the room: The dynamics of owners (in the form of intellectual or capital property) and the ones who build the spaces for the owners (For hire programmers and day to day users, whom with or without a salary create the products of the proprietor).
We must go beyond the chant of free software, free society, because societies are not built on property by itself but by the producers of said property. Free and open source code will not create a free and open society, instead it will create transparently cheep labor for closed source proprietors. To ignore the boss-worker relationship will feed into the boss’ agenda of profits and growth. However, if we build a movement conscious of the economic realities of our time, it will necessarily advocate for a free and open society by means of user-ownership. We can’t even begun to build a society if we don’t hold any power to change the source code, the antagonism between platform owners and platform builders is the line of code we ought to edit.
My writings from now own will focus on this relationship and other related phenomenons. The majority of my efforts will go into my book, witch I am slowly beginning to write (coherently). It has an unusual (non)structure for now, its made up of multiple mini-thesis or bite sized essays. This way I can jog down an idea and add it to the pile, and hopefully someday I can begin editing the madness and joining it all together. I choose this method since my previous attempts involved writing an index of sorts, and then transforming a chapter tile into an actual chapter. This method of skeleton writing seems to be popular amongst amateur non-fiction creators and writing gurus, but that method fails to grasp an idea you’re developing in real time - Like I am. To find the essays of my soon to become book can be found of my github repo, however this blog will take a stand of second priority. Hopefully I can public one essay here on my blog, but for now this place will be more explicitly personal and political, since the book aspires to be accessible from all political angles.
Before ending this post, I would like to address my readers. To my surprise I at least have one reader, since not to long ago I got an e-mail from one, if you’re reading this, hello. Feel free to contact me about my posts and my work, but for the love of god don’t start a para-social relationship with me. Anyways, here I go, off to write more about technology!