It's fascinating how would-be radical blogs in the US blogosphere mimic the life-cycle of the authoritarian Left parties which historically preceded them. These blogs first emerged out of scattered, desperate moments of individual resistance to neoliberalism -- a textual Leninism, as it were, borne of the irreconcilable confrontation between the critical consciousness and the thorny contradictions of neoliberalism.
During moments of neoliberal crisis, and if the blog founder has the requisite talent and energy, the blog quickly expands. It soon hits its peak with a slew of fresh contributors, each contributing something new and useful to the conversation.
At a certain point, however, the intellectual reach and managerial capacity of any single founder (or even group of founders) begins to run aground on the sheer amount of information aggregated by the site. That information requires a collective set of skills, theories, and experiences, and most of all a cooperative division of labor which must be slowly and painfully constructed over time (think of the effort required to create and maintain the average university department).
This necessity comes into conflict with the original mandate of the blog, which was to showcase the particularity of the founder's voice. The inevitable result is a wild oscillation between information bloat -- useful items are buried under an ocean of trivia -- and trolling -- the recourse to lazy epithets, idiotic cliches, and foolish propaganda. Both poles of the oscillation drive out thoughtful posts and rigorous critical thinking.
At a certain point, it becomes a chore to sift through the dross to find the gems. Suddenly, textual Leninism generates the inevitable recoil of administrative recentralization, a.k.a editorial Stalinism. The critique of neoliberal dogma turns into a new kind of doxa -- as stagnant and unthinking as what it once claimed to critique. The same bloggers who once shared their insights on topics they know better than anyone else suddenly turn, as if by magic, into the most provincial and ignorant blowhards, whenever they are confronted with concepts or experiences outside of their professional competence. They stop doing original research, reading new books, or engaging in any contemporary cultural activity, and retreat to an inner circle of long-time experiences, arguments and cronies.
The most characteristic sign of this new doxa is the intellectual regression away from class struggle and back into conspiracy theory. In the realm of the US blogosphere, this new doxa critiques the lies of the US plutocracy - by declaring the lies of non-American plutocrats to be truth. It critiques the genocides of the US empire - by denying that the genocides of the numerous other empires in the world-system ever happened. It complains endlessly about the foolish voters who vote for the Reps or Dems - by denying that any other country has elections worth paying attention to, or democratic processes worth learning from, or actual citizens with their own opinions and modes of political organization.
The laudable attempt to democratize information recoils into its opposite: into yet another information monopoly, where the self-selected few know all -- because the masses are, by definition, too stupid to know anything, and anyone who disagrees is obviously a CIA agent. That is why the single most prevalent emotional tone of such blogs is a chaotic, insensate despair -- leavened with rage at the occasional dissident and heretic who dares to contradict the doxa.
To paraphrase Brecht, even if has a thousand posters, such blogs end up having only one-tenth of a brain.
Conversely, the task for we digital commoners of the 21st century is to do just the opposite: to enable a network of one hundred to think with the productivity of one thousand. One of the most intriguing models for this productivity is the transnational videogame studio, where small groups of three to four hundred talented developers are creating game-worlds and interactive experiences far richer, more detailed, and more satisfying than the multiple thousands of personnel and hundreds of millions of dollars required by the average Hollywood blockbuster.
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