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January 17, 2005

"Why Don't Techno-Utopians Read Political Theory?"

Mitch and I both ran across Jodi Dean's
comments about Extreme Democracy. Jodi felt characterizes the book as techno-utopian:

There's nothing wrong with optimism. It's helpful, inspiring even. But, why do the contributors to this discussion (which also includes Joi Ito et al's celebration of emergent democracy) stop reading political theory after the Federalist Papers? It's like they are all stuck in the 18th century with their emphases on free choice and the autonomous individual. There is no acknowledgement of ideologies, structures in which individuals emerge as individuals, systems of identity configuration through sex, race, ethnicity. People are oddly transparent to each other and themselves, oddly good intentioned, oddly able to solve all sorts of massive problems by sharing information--that they might have major ideological differences, that they might hate and want to kill each other, doesn't appear.
I hope we'll get more constructive feedback on the chapters posted here; we're reorganizing the book for hardcopy publication.

Posted by Jon Lebkowsky at 7:08 AM | Comments (19) | TrackBack