Would you have said this about moveable type? After all, books printed by the press are no different in their content from books written in the scriptorium. Internet society can do things that are novel. E.g., this blog medium is novel. It cannot be approximated by an exchange of letters or telephone conference calls. It has enormous potential for intellectual collaboration, because it can rapidly knit together contributions from the entire world.

When something radically novel arrives, it forces an appraisal of how that thing impinges upon other things. Politics will obviously change, and so will political philosophy. Of course, one always has the option to say “same as it ever was,” to which I would reply, watch and learn.

Consider: 2000 years ago I might have spent life bashing people over the head with a club. I can now bash people over the head with computer equipment, thus adding a handy measure of economic value to my chosen pursuit.

Ruskin, Morris, Kropotkin, Orwell, Macdonald, and Chomsky long predated the Internet. For all its virtues, I don’t see that the Internet makes it possible to do anything of value that they haven’t done.

We are really back to the future in terms of Socratic dialog, or blogalog, so we have some trouble getting started with leveling assumptions and sorting out personalities. My apologies for bad manners, but I will keep trying to make myself understood.

I am basically pushing the view that the rise of the public Internet is a watershed event in intellectual life. Accordingly, I think a far-reaching reappraisal of political theory, political science, and political philosophy is in order. One consequence of this reappraisal will be a diminished reverence for abstract armchair political philosophy (e.g., contemplating relationships between liberalism and pluralism) and an increased appetite for more rigorous, novel, and engaged kinds of political study.

I think Kuhn’s idea about scientific revolutions applies to schools of philosophy as well, and a blog like this one is a good place to have a productive struggle. I will do my best to keep the conflict polite.

Perhaps a good orientation point would be Manuel Castells’ three books on the Information Age. He lays out a lot of evidence for what I would call the “Big Bang” view of the Internet.

I’m looking forward to a long and fruitful exchange of arguments.

Perhaps the misunderstanding is caused by your referring to “practical politics” and political sort of ‘pluralism’ in the post. Practical politics and academic philosophy are not well connected; naturally people start talking about different things and feel that the other group is missing the point.

This actually gets at the reason I assumed you were a fool, hh. You waltzed into a discussion without demonstrating any understanding of what people were talking about. (Failure to grasp even elementary distinctions between different kinds of theory: not a good start.) So far, your sole argument for the superiority of your own position consists of you labeling it superior. That is, you were – and still are? – apparently content to argue exclusively by auto-credentialization.

But this is the internet, man. You need to give us a reason.

Whoa! You just killed off a lot of very interesting people, including:

Hamlet
Odysseus
Oliver Twist
Clayton Waxwing III
Batman
Cornelius Suttree

These people are more interesting to me than most of the individuals I have met.

You have really perfected a steady state existence in Pynchon-space. Even when what you say makes zero sense, your upscale bricolage artistry is dazzling. I raise one eyebrow fractionally in tribute.

“a dissonance shock wave.” A moment of aphasia. Yes yes, we know (some of us at least)
I once read a defense of a preference for snapshots over “serious” photography based on that logic. The author was a tenured radish of the highest theoretical and moral seriousness. But I prefer my Stendhal syndrome attacks well earned. I’ve spent most of my life learning to outpace an incipient autism, maybe that’s why this all is so obvious.
The literature of synchrony, of collapsed time. Jesu Christu. Make the ganglia twitch. Mine eyes dazzle.
The needle Watson, I think I’m gonna plotz.