Published Date 2/5/14 12:18 PM
In tech the successful part of the corporate internet is building peer-to-peer(ish) web projects. This is after the wholesale failure of the top-down hierarchical internet that went bankrupt in the dotcom boom. facebook and twitter, 4square and instagram, youtube etc are all built on horizontal(ish) peer production. Activism is still in the sterile and narrow dotcom boom of vertical knowledge production and distribution. The perfect tool widely used for this is the wordpress blogging platform. It’s a tool for a single voice, for the top to speak to the foot solderers. Beyond its commenting system the is no peer production in a wordpress setup.
The hierarchical corporations are doing peer to peer production, the horizontal activists are doing top-down hierarchical. If the wholesale failure of activism wasn’t important I would laugh at them. Here is an advert from frackoff:
“This spring, Frack Off are sponsoring WordPress training for a dozen new local anti-fracking groups across the country and are looking for WordPress trainers who will work for train fare, money for a pasty or two and of course the good feeling of doing something worthwhile for a really good cause. Frack Off need at least three or four tech activists who know their way round WordPress to deliver the training in various parts of the country.
At the risk of overselling the project, this will be a great opportunity for someone to do a spot of travelling and meet some of the local campaigners and grassroots activists who are giving hell to the frackers and working to get this destructive practice stopped before it gets started in the UK.”
This represents a failure in every way imaginable, a failure of ideology, a failure of strategic thinking, a failure of leadership. And a failure of social change. Tech activism is currently not going anywhere.
There is nothing inherently wrong with wordpress. It’s a fine tool for nice looking top-down single voice web portals. Where the wrongness lies is in the activist media use of it as the “tool” to build an internet site for activist campaigning. It is the wrong tool for this.
Activist peer to peer tools would be wikis http://en.wikipedia.org
Sites that have activity feeds such as http://visionon.tv
Aggregating sites http://globalviews.visionon.tv
Ps. I use the (ish) for corporate peer to peer production as it is ONLY the face of P2P. Underneath it is a solid controlling hierarchy just like it always was.