Not too long ago, there was an exchange of emails amongst a few bloggers in SDS about trying to tie together SDS’ers blogs into some common project, something a bit more coherent.
As many such exchanges go, it generated some excitement but fell by the wayside in the middle of a crunch around Finals-time. So maybe it’s time to take that idea off the bikerack and put it into effect.
There’s several potential solutions. One of the ones I would like to commit to would be passive, wouldn’t require a lot of effort, but could help boost up readership and interest in blogging from the SDS angle.
It’d involve the following:
- Consolidating the RSS feeds from SDS’ers blogs into a single, easily-to-subscribe-to RSS feed.
- Using that feed to power a Feedburner Headline Animator displaying the headlines of SDS’ers blogs that anybody with a blog or MySpace page could add.
- Taking some time to promote both the feed and Headline Animator on Facebook.
What’s all this jibber jabber about RSS and some Headline Animator? Check out some info on the Headline Animator from Feedburner. All it does is take the RSS feed and does a ticker of the headlines from an RSS feed. In this case, it’d be SDS’ers blogs.
If you’re an SDS’er and would like to participate, please leave a comment to this story that includes your site’s address plus the address of your RSS feed. This is a volunteer project, so give this about a week to start up.
pipila said
I think an important thing to notice about technology, and the internet in particular, is the way in which it has (and can) undermine one of the twin legal pillars of bourgeois society, that is, it undermines the regime of property by creating a kind of intellectual commons.
To put it another way, at the highest and most abstract level of property (intellectual property) the internet fundamentally undercuts the ability to maintain and police that legal regime. Not only this but it creates the possibility of a different regime for the production of intellectual and cultural works.
The scary thing is that, in the difficulties presented by intellectual property claims on the internet, and the development of an intellectual commons in which anonymous or socially produced intellectual and cultural works are created at rapid speeds, capital is increasingly moving towards commodifying the creative process itself. Or to put it another way capital is moving to restrict access to the commons, but also is finding ways of extracting value, not from the finished products, but from the process, in other words datamining.
I think there is grounds for communists to consider active political work around internet issues. That is, the internet should not be viewed simply as a political tool, like any other piece of communications technology, but should be viewed in certain instances as a grounds of political struggle. A place where we fight to increase the dissonance between the legal regime of property and a creative process that subverts it, and a place where we fight to maintain this possibility.
I am reminded of the RIAA spoof declaring that downlaoding mp3s without paying for them is communism, I think we should embrace that.
There may in fact be grounds for a mass movement around such issues in the not too distant future. I note that the anonymous/chanology movement is superficially about going after Scientology, and was actually triggered by the actions of Co$ to restrict speech on the internet and in particular to make a property claim on the Youtube video of Tom Cruise freaking out. I think that particular movement is a harbinger of possible things to come. Though I don´t think there is much cause to directly relate to it, due to its narrow focus and some of the more disturbing aspects of its spontaneous ideology.