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Abstract

Democracy and Queerness: Accelerated Individualism

Liberal democracy was the perfect accelerant for technological innovation. Individual creativity flourished, leading to an explosion of new technologies which reflect the values of their makers. These technologies took on a logic of their own, accelerating and compressing individualism into queerness. In extremis, the logic of self-making is the loss of identity. There is some refuge to be found in traditional institutions, but these too are being eroded by the same mechanisms - the technological component of which has largely been ignored by reformers.

Outline

Democratization

  • History of liberal democracy and its relationship with technology
  • The logic of digital media is to accelerate, compress, and simplify (McLuhan)
  • Digital media came out of a pluralistic, democratic society, and was unreflectively adopted because it reflected our values.
  • Democratization fallacy, "A more perfect liquefaction" (Carr 12-14, 130, 131, 145)
  • "But a medium of perfect anonymity has no more to offer, politically speaking, than a medium of perfect transparency: both crypto anarchists and communists with Chinese charactersitics share the aim of eliminating the need for public life. Both therefore share the same altogether negative notion of freedom." This is the freedom to an undisturbed private life, which is the freedom not to be responsible because policy consists in technical challenges that are better managed by able administrators. (Barba-Kay 146)
  • The Swarm (HF) and "Authenticity" (HF 51) - individualism leads to the mass
  • "Scaling" communities, "frictionless sharing", technocracy (Carr 17). Society does not scale (Carr 18, 164)
  • "Digital globalism" (HF 205)
  • Leads to centralization (McLuhan, 95, 100)

Making a new self (HF 51)

  • The rule of imagination over memory (HF 177)
  • Queer design (HF 180-181)
  • Quantification/instrumetalization (HF 55, 58)
  • The queering of the self is to make the self explicit (HF 176, 178)
  • "The data-driven character of the medium is such as to translate larger human questions about how to live into technical puzzles that may be... 'hacked'." (Barba-Kay, 42)
  • "Techno-gnosticism" (HF 158)

Grounding: family, church, politics, culture

  • CHT https://vimeo.com/761665339 @11:00 - feedback loop between technology, culture, and institutions/markets
  • CHT Framework of Interventions https://www.humanetech.com/solutions
  • Aristotle on politics (HF)
  • The problem comes from technology, that should be our starting point even though people are rightly discouraged about it. Institutions are shaped by technology as well.
  • The political system is corrupt, and is actively working against the interests of the people
  • We need to take responsibility for ourselves - this act alone is salutary
  • This book focuses on technology