Subj : Book: iMaGoLoGieS
To   : All
From : osito
Date : Wed Oct 25 2023 15:22:48

I read this book Imagologies published in 1994. Its about two professors of philosophy who link their classes via tele-conference technology. One classroom is in the US, and the other is in Finland. They write about the technologies as they use them, and how the new media technologies are going to revolutionize the world. You can feel the excitement and their hope for the future in their words.

The internet back then had no central hub, everyone had an equal voice. So they foresaw changes in the roles of leadership and politics, as it would become more collaborative, because every person had an equal voice. This situation, is really the goal of democracy somewhat; The sense that the ensemble of citizens come together to make decisions for the nation.

They asked "on the internet, where is the capitol?"  hinting at there was no centralization, with only the smallest organization, it was like the wild west. However, the internet today does not look like this. we can identify many 'large cities' like google etc. and they use their gravity to censor. and government even passes laws to ensure censorship is law on the internet.

Censorship is the polar opposite of what the early pioneers dreamt of. It seems weird that a system of scattered nodes and users would lead to a system where these nodes have to pass through a small amount of selected nodes in order to reach other nodes (diffuse their message/opinions)

I am starting to think that government may have gave some investments, or enticements to these 'large cities' as long as they went along with the censorship of ideas. If the political class saw a more collaborative leadership revolution coming, I am certain they would do something to squash that.

So I just want to say, centralization is bad, we should all host our own googles, youtubes, emails and twitters.

Osito

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