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ShayBanerjeeSecondEssay 3 - 09 Jan 2016 - Main.EbenMoglen
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META TOPICPARENT | name="SecondEssay" |
| | A new class of Technologists has emerged, comprised of these three pillars, built in the People’s Image, made possible by a new age, guided in service of freedom, security, and prosperity. With its emergence will arrive new battlegrounds, new campaigns, new fights — a new class struggle for the beating heart of the human race. The particular form that struggle takes remains to be seen, but freedom demands these three pillars are protected, grown, allowed to flourish. The Corporation-State has no interest to do these things, so the People must. | |
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In genre terms, though, it's an aria: an exercise in rhetoric-with-music, not the political analysis of which it is only the operatic analogue.
I understand the temptation, myself. It's not that I've never worked in the genre. But without the benefit of some really clever co-authors, you do have to carry the burden of theoretical sufficiency. And you can't seriously get the reader to participate in the illusion that the whistleblower, the hacktivist and the social entrepreneur are forces on the relevant scale. Not even Mr Snowden—who is not a whistleblower but rather the most successful professional espionage agent of our time, a man who spied for humanity as a whole more brilliantly than anyone has spied for any country on earth for several generations—is a force on the scale about which you are ... well, singing.
In the end, I think, the decision about the direction of revision is
about the desire either to be in or out of the frame of resonant
fairyland. It's the world of Gesamkunstwerk, to be sure. But
still, I think, the sort of stuff law firm partners like to be seen
at, dressed expensively, when their brains are tired.
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