Progress won't 'emerge'

Reliably adversarial article from an old sparring partner, Sandy Starr from Spiked Online, objecting to the idea that democracy and enlightenment can 'emerge' from social and technical networks (the social-software movement that fuelled the Howard Dean campaign, or the text-politics that brought down the Phillipines government, the usually cited examples). Here's his sum-up, with predictably pejorative ludic metaphors:

Common is the sentiment [among emergent democrats] that all we need to do, in order to use the internet to our best advantage, is to submit to the chaotic patterns that emerge from our playful use of it. As Jim Banister argues, 'eventually, collective consciousness within networked media will evolve to the point that it surpasses collective ignorance - a collective conscience, if you will'.

This couldn't be further from the truth. Ignorance cannot be overcome, nor progress maintained, through this passive stance; these things were hard won by our historical predecessors, and they have to be continually fought for. The natural process of evolution may have supplied us with the bodies we inhabit, but it is we who have taken things forward from there - developing, among countless other achievements, medicine with which to combat infirmity, transport with which to traverse the globe, electrification with which to power our technology, and yes, the internet with which to communicate.

We could just drop the baton and leave it at that, using the internet as a playground in which to be indolent humanodes, letting things emerge as they will from now on. Or we could live up to our potential as human beings and take the next step in the march of progress.

They're useful as 'enlightenment fundamentalists', these Spikers - keep us playful types on our toes. But their inability to think through paradox - that humans can imagine both playing with reality, and playing a part in reality - is a legacy of their old ultra-left activist past. (Though I always thought the old man understood this: 'Men make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing?').