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Prometheus Wired: The Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network Technology
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May 3, 2012
A vintage 2000 critique of digital-utopian claims. Remarkably insightful and prescient, but deeply eccentric. Barney draws extensively on etymology to make claims linking Greek conceptions of politics and craft to networked computers, and provides an analysis based heavily on Heidegger and Marx.
The Marxism works: Barney's analysis of "ownership of the means of production" for workers in the network society is scathing and spot on. Heidegger... his metaphysics is white noise to me, so I can't make anything of claims based on it.
The work has a major flaw twelve years on that might not have been such on publication: much of the book is a detailed general-audiences explanation of every aspect of networked computing, down to a couple pages on what an ATM is. I can't imagine that much of this was actually needful in 2000, as opposed to ten years earlier, and it's a complete waste now. Better to have, as other authors have done, buried most of the detail in an appendix or provided a note that the knowledgeable or incurious should skip chapters devoted solely to lengthy magazine-article-level technological description.
Still, unlike most turn of the century critiques, Barney goes beyond a *rejection* of libertarian-capitalist internet exceptionalism to argue that the fundamental concepts are *technically* wrong: that the network is *not* egalitarian by nature, but rather a tool for capitalist extension and surveillance.
The Marxism works: Barney's analysis of "ownership of the means of production" for workers in the network society is scathing and spot on. Heidegger... his metaphysics is white noise to me, so I can't make anything of claims based on it.
The work has a major flaw twelve years on that might not have been such on publication: much of the book is a detailed general-audiences explanation of every aspect of networked computing, down to a couple pages on what an ATM is. I can't imagine that much of this was actually needful in 2000, as opposed to ten years earlier, and it's a complete waste now. Better to have, as other authors have done, buried most of the detail in an appendix or provided a note that the knowledgeable or incurious should skip chapters devoted solely to lengthy magazine-article-level technological description.
Still, unlike most turn of the century critiques, Barney goes beyond a *rejection* of libertarian-capitalist internet exceptionalism to argue that the fundamental concepts are *technically* wrong: that the network is *not* egalitarian by nature, but rather a tool for capitalist extension and surveillance.
Displaying 1 of 1 review