Y’all are sitting there pondering one of the great Left issues of the day. Is Facebook part of the class struggle? Are people on Facebook a class, and if so are they exploiting or exploited? Why are new forms of social media so dangerous?

Yes, it’s the American Left in the form of Benjamin Barber having one of its fascinatingly amusing soul-searching sessions:

The third problem liberals face is the loss of their alternative paradigm – the vanquishing of socialism and communism by the market paradigm. Call it the disintegration of the “Great Left Alternative Paradigm,” which was always a difficult and troublesome and problematic, not least of all because the abstract and noble socialist paradigm was attached to the ignoble and failed practices of Soviet (and Chines) (sic) Communism.

The paradox was that what illuminated egalitarianism and social justice in a theoretical perspective seemed to contradict them when put into practice by revolutionaries in Russia, China, Cuba and North Korea…

To which one says HAHAHAHA. Seemed!

Continuing: 

Marxism isn’t really the issue: I mean, after all, we actually know that in 1967 the only real Marxists were in the University of Massachusetts economics department. Those governing in Russia, Cuba, Vietnam or China were fakes using an old ideology to impose a new form of terror…

Curious how so many Marxists in Western universities and media went so far out of their way to aplologise for these terrorists, and in the case of Cuba still do.

Anyway, on it goes at great length making no sense at all on economics (he bewails the ‘diminishing of government’!) until finally he gets to social media:

If I am going to address where America is today (and where the world is) interdependently, I want to address— it’s probably not a class—call it “Those Who Are On Facebook” — five hundred million people around the world on Facebook— more than half of all Americans. I want to talk more generally about social media. Democratic or anti-democratic? Exploitative or not? Are they part of a class struggle, or not?

I’m not sure those terms really help; I do know this—I believe (and be happy I won’t make the argument now!) that Facebook and social media are actually anti-social media, anti-political media, anti-civic media.

They act against the interest of participatory democracy; they act against the interest of interdependence—even though they use a web archeology that is both interdependent and democratic. Democratic in the sense that their architecture is horizontal, face-to-face, person-to-person.

That, to me, is a great tragedy; that the great new innovative technology of our time—that young people particularly love—is being used not for purposes of democracy and leveling and equality and the struggle for justice, but is used instead for privatized gossip, for interaction among people who are looking for others just like them rather than looking for people who are different than they are.

Imagine that! People in vast numbers being free to mind their own business and not fret about ‘the struggle for justice"!

But it’s much harder, because it doesn’t let itself to these easy kinds of things, to talk about who “owns” social media, who owns the World Wide Web. Does ownership of hardware or a software platform mean control of the medium? What if the software is “bundled” into the hardware? Should we be for or against “net neutrality” or open source software? …from the perspective of social justice?

What if? Always a good question.

Oh well. I am proud to be the first person in the world to add a comment to this superb hand-wringing speech.

Read the whole thing.

But write your will first, in case you die laughing.