Positions · Thursday November 16, 2006
Kevin’s response made me think: the most popular blogs on the web tend to embrace a libertarian capitalist discourse rather than one of resistance and/or emancipation. Which makes my optimistic view of blogging/web technologies somewhat problematic in the context of dominant media narratives.
This isn’t to say that I’m a revolutionary Marxist or a hardcore radical left-winger. Ideologically I’m probably something of a social democrat. But of course, in order to make a living, one must be co-opted by the very system that one critiques. I DESIGN WEBSITES FOR BUSINESSES IN ORDER TO MAKE MONEY TO PAY RENT AND BUY FOOD, for goodness sake.
If I conduct research into the libertarian/capitalist leanings of popular blogs such as Wired/BoingBoing/Engadget, I’ll be leaving out a huge realm of actual resistance that is happening on the web. If I look solely at the realm of resistance, I’ll be ignoring the still very dominant modes of power and control that exist, even in a relatively decentralised medium such as the web.
What sort of position are we left with? What realm does theory occupy? We speak neither from within or without. We can speak from everyday living and do the best we can to reveal those myriad modes of political, social, economic, and cultural oppression. We can try to reduce suffering and oppose injustice in the world.
But shit, it still doesn’t change the fact that I’m speaking from a position of embodied historical dominance, as a white middle-class Protestant male born in England, raised in Portland, Oregon (bastion of liberalism), and typing this on a $2000 Powerbook while listening to indie rock on my 40gb iPod.
Ah, I am aghast at everything. This seems like such a high school sort of rant. Where to go from here?
I have 13 hours to find out.
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