Sistemas, democracia y utopías tecnológicas
18 Jan 2014Unas lúcidas palabras de Adam Curtis:
Technology, and the spread of information it allows, can gather people together in squares in Egypt. What I find somewhat naive is the idea that you find within a lot of this web utopianism. Which is that, somehow, you can get a new democracy like this. Because underlying this, there’s the idea that all what democracy is, is all of us connected as nodal points of a network and —with feedback, a cybernetic idea— we’ll get to a shared harmony and out of that we’ll come to a shared harmony and order. Last time I looked, that’s not what democracy is, just a lot of individuals. That’s a naive market idea of democracy that we suffer from. Democracy is negotiating between the powerless and large, strong vested interests in society who often use their unequal access to power to their advantage at the expense of the less powerful. Democracy is about electing people who will stand up and represent you —the weak— and negotiate against the powerful. I’m very sympathetic to those movements, but self organizing systems are just that. They’re a retreat to managerialism, they’re a retreat to bureaucracy, they’re only a system. And that’s the ideology of our time: we’re all systems. What I argue, is that all those revolutions —if you look at them now— they all have gone backwards. They were incredibly noble, brave, hundreds of thousands people challenged those in power and got rid of them. What next? The idea that we’re all systems, and that system stabilizes itself is just that. We stabilize ourselves and that’s it. Is limiting or useless. (Cita tomada de una entrevista en el programa radial Little Atoms)