21st Century Big Data Socialism

Description

Kees van der Pijl:

"Bauwens and his co-authors see the key emancipatory feature of the Internet in the ‘capacity to massively scale up many-to-many communication, and therefore, in its capacity to lower the cost of selforganization and create and distribute value in radically new ways’. Whether these capacities are truly placed at the service of all, or specifically serve the new middle class of technical and managerial cadre, then will depend on the strength of the popular movement and the changes in the current property regime to satisfy its demands.

What distinguishes a 21st-century Big Data socialism from the labour socialism of the last century, certainly once it was pushed back into the agricultural, culturally backward (semi-) periphery of the imperialist system, is that it would not be a ‘willed’ utopia, to be realised if need be by mass coercion. It would find the IT infrastructure largely in place and the accompanying consciousness taking shape around it— assuming that the manipulation of the collective mindset will not develop much further than what is happening today and that the capacity to mentally grasp the world through autonomous, active cognition, remains intact." ((https://www.academia.edu/40678009/Democracy_ecology_and_Big_Data._Can_they_be_combined_into_a_21st-_century_socialism?))