Yes, captain… I’ll get to it as soon as I finish the 200+ other books I have bought over the last 20 years, but failed to read :-(. In the meantime, can’t I pay you your referral fee :-), and have you answer this question: I don’t buy that the very form of a “blog” (which is just a silly word for a website with some sort of easy authoring for non-techies) prevents greater cohesion (I mean, freaking DailyKos have done it, haven’t they?). And I can’t believe that Dean believes that, given the stuff she said in her chat with you.
I think it is true that the Internet (always with an uppercase I) has libertarian overtones (in strong historical/attitudinal terms and weak technological terms), but it’s not an insurmountable problem. What prevents doughenwood.wordpress.com, michaelperelman.wordpress.com, Crooked Timber, econospeak.blogspot.com (Blogger? really?), juliohuato.wordpress.com, d-squareddigest.blogspot.com, i cite, etc, from being instead a collective affair? I suspect it’s because the respective eminences (and I use the word in entirely celebratory tone) behind the sites disagree on small technical matters that the rest of us inexperts can neither care about nor comprehend. But perhaps I am wrong.
You might say, look, stop with all this nonsense about 'collective affair’ when what you (ravi, almost always with a lowercase r) really mean is some superficial computer networking technical fluff which puts all our writings into the same MySQL database. True, true. But superficial shit like that matters… I really believe that. And from what I heard, Jodi Dean believes some version of that, to some extent, as well… which is why I brought up this rather tiring rant of mine, yet again.
Or instead:
The other chap who responded to me took deep umbrage to my use of the term/idea “[methodological] individualism” - utter silliness he called it. Look at the institutions, man, he exhorted. Okay fair enough, American is not my first language. I didn’t realise Schumpeter and/or Weber had already added my folksy term to the technical lexicon. So scratch that. But yes, then, let’s look to the existing institutions. Let’s appropriate them, reform them, and reuse them to organise around our thoughts and ideas, and to will ourselves out into the streets. Everyone from Chomsky down (whether they see themselves as down from Chomsky or not) seems to think that the truth will set you off. Blog it, and they will go [out into the streets]. But perhaps it is real, smell the BO solidarity that will set us off? [*]
—ravi
[*] Can I play the Cornel West of LBO?