What is interesting is that I wrote about this for my class last semester. Check it out here

http://docs.google.com/View?id=dgxz823m_19cgrc8nfr

All about a possible digital socialist movement, and before Kelly this time!

As said, I've been thinking about this quite a lot too. I wrote such a long comment that I thought I might as well just blog it, so here's my response:

http://www.youngradical.com/2009/05/the-new-socialism-sounds-suspiciousl...

In short, the premise is that Nancy's comment that collectivism is akin to Stalinism and Kelly's assertions that "the old socialism" is basically Stalinism exemplify a total modern misunderstanding of the goals of Marxist socialism. Stalinism, Maoism and others are horrible distortions. I think these new social technologies may be saying a lot about potential socialist ways of organizing society, but many of them also are simply Capitalist businesses in which a minority still benefit from the labor of the majority.

The blog post is quite a bit more thorough and eloquent though - would love to get some comments and healthy discussion going on! Thanks for posting this Nancy!

I'm glad Kelly has come clean on his communism finally in the final days of Wired, which is all out of ad business and desperately trying to stay afloat. Kelly's "8 generatives" were about as effective as the Soviet "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us" concept of collective farms in terms of generating revenue.

Kelly's wrong in a 100 ways which I'll get to on my blog, but chiefly, he's wrong that this new socialism is less rigid. If anything, it's more rigid and hysterical precisely because it's able to appear in groovy new cyber clothing, so if you complain about it, it can tell you that you're not cool. Have you ever tried to criticize a group of opensource zealots? You just haven't seen "rigid".

The idea that there's all these people "working for free" as if in some global barn-raiser is also terribly misleading. All those people are paid *somewhere* -- by big IT, grants, mom's basement. Their free labour is surplus value generated from their pre-existing affluent states. They haven't made some new machine for making value after you work for free, they've just merely gotten themselves a hobby -- and their hobby undermines the valuation of the work for others.

And spare me the argument that if socialism like this doesn't have a traditional state running it, it's mild and innocent. Nothing of the sort. If anything, it's even more creepy and entrenched when it comes in the form of a TOS for some massive service like Twitter or Facebook than if it comes in the forum of a state at least nominally under the rule of law, with at least some kind of judicial system. Did you know that a tiny cabal of mainly men decide all the controversial items on Wikipedia and have the power simply to ban anybody who disagrees with them? Have you ever had your Ad Sense pulled arbitrarily? You cannot face your accusers, be informed of the charges against you, and your right to appeal is a joke. Ever been kicked off the Second Life forums because you criticized the software company Linden Lab for its favouritism to some residents? These are all the "charms" that await you dealing with non-state socialism -- which is an awful lot like the "charms" of dealing with state socialism.

At least with state communism and socialism, you have a place to go to rebel against it -- civil society. The awful thing about Kelly's forced global collectivism is that it purports to BE the civil society. You can try to make ANOTHER civil society to go against it -- good luck, when all their companies own the servers!

There's also the myth of Creative Commons which I call Creative Communism, which browbeats everyone into giving away everything for free merely to get credit and "spread their name around" and which, in all these years, has never worked toward creating a micropayment system to ensure that people online can get paid for people using copies of their digital content. Shame on them.

People who push the Web 2.0 global collectivism are people who don't need to get paid for their work, who either "come from money," or made their first million off selling proprietary software and can now have the luxury of opensource doodling (that's quite widespread among the California ideologues), or else they take lecture fees for lecturing about...how you can get paid by giving away everything for free (Doctorow is particularly good about not really selling books, but getting fees for telling everyone they should give their books away for free and make money at...other stuff like lectures on...opensource.)

Aside from being unlawful, the new socialism is also a big racket, just like the old one.

Adam Smith could hardly be pleased at a mammoth 350-million member entity that apparently is barely profitable and doesn't have a viable business model, and yet controls a lot of time and attention of the people using the service.

Bottom-up communitarianism can be just as oppressive as state-run top-down socialism when you have no choice -- because you are either bound by a TOS put in by the new "venture communists," or you are a minority view in a "community" where the new socialists browbeat you for criticizing their ideology and can ban you on a whim.

Kelly's real attitude toward communism can also be seen in the shocking moral blindness involved in putting a bank bailout or Wikipedia on the same timeline as Stalin's mass murder.

Kelly claims that Web 2.0 doesn't involve class warfare. Of course it does. He has never seen the zealous tenacity that the class warriors of Silicon Valley display in holding to power against all critics and competition.

I don't it's that fascinating a discussion, the only thing that is good to come out of this article, like Joi Ito's admission that he is a "venture communist," is that Kelly has come clean about naming his collectivist ideology, so that people like me who have been calling Web 2.0 "social media" "socialist media" all this time don't have to be branded as tinfoil hatted nutters.

Let's hope naming the socialism what it is, is the first step in defeating it : )