Metafilter: internet as hyper-liberalism
INTERNET AS HYPER-LIBERALISM: By the limitations of common sense and consensus. Sometime wacky ideas can help us look at things much clearer than a technical manual description of them by rational and well argued people. Paul Treanor is a one-of-a-kind writer. don't try to argue with him about being wrong. he does not believe in communication and therefore there is no CONTACT link anywhere on his site. He writes and lives in Amsterdam, Holland.posted by sundaymag at 4:50 PM PST (30 comments total)

To make the basic assumption that the internet was ever supposed to be the perfectly democratic marketplace of ideas is utter crap: It is to deny that its roots are military communication with the ultimate goal of developing an efficient and redundant mode of info transfer, not some great big Gutenberg press to free the masses from the tyranny of the bourgeousie.
Do you bring this to the blue to establish that the blue is just another monolithic mechanism of alienation and an oppressive diode / triode effector (with associated Rawls effects)?
Kaczynski argued more eloquently for the luddite way, I'm afraid.
I've been looking for the perfect example of a sophistry, and thanks to this link that denies its own right to exist, I've found it.
posted by isopraxis at 7:10 PM PST on January 10

wow. this pile-on is embarrassing. paul treanor is a serious and controversial political philosopher and urbanist. his stance is decidely radical and revolutionary. a lot of his work is purposefully apparently self-contradictory, such as his constant calling of anglo-logocentrism in globalist efforts (often u.s. administration of the internet) to task while still writing about it in english. somehow, there always seems to be an embedded point to these apparent contradictions, as along the arc of baudrillard. he's not actually anti-internet for whatever he sounds like superficially. a deep reading of his many essays and interviews shows he's simply against the internet as a carrier of neoliberal cultural hegemony. but he uses knee jerk responses to defend *or deny the existence of* libertarian tendencies of the internet to expose contradictions of the underlying assumumptions of those tendencies.
in the bataillean line of disappearance, there is purposefully little information available about him as well, although he seems pretty well known in academic circles. just like some people here don't care about trashing his contrarianism, he doesn't want to join your party, either. it's often ironic that reaction to treanor illustrates many of his points about interconnected channels of communication.
i'm like sundaymag. i haven't made up my mind about treanor, either. but he is definitely has innovative approaches to provoking thought among the thoughtful in the vein of paul virilio.
on preview:To make the basic assumption (non sequitur leap) that the internet was ever supposed to be the perfectly democratic marketplace of ideas is utter crap: It is to deny that its roots are military communication with the ultimate goal of developing an efficient and redundant mode of info transfer, not some great big Gutenberg press to free the masses from the tyranny of the bourgeousie.
i think he was arguing pretty clearly against those who make the assumption "net ideology assumes universal communication." that is, he is arguing against net ideologies which fight against "as many internets as there are users" in a real, as opposed to a virtual, sense.
again, this pile-on is embarrassing.
posted by 3.2.3 at 8:14 PM PST on January 10