The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online

My colleague Debbie Henney forwarded to me the following article from Wired.


http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism?currentPage=1

The author of the article writes:

But there is one way in which socialism is the wrong word for what is happening: It is not an ideology. It demands no rigid creed. Rather, it is a spectrum of attitudes, techniques, and tools that promote collaboration, sharing, aggregation, coordination, ad hocracy, and a host of other newly enabled types of social cooperation. It is a design frontier and a particularly fertile space for innovation.


In my reply to her I wrote:

This is an interesting, if very confused article. The author talks about the libertarian elements of digital communities and the collaboration that wiki and blogs foster seem more in line with the Hayekian emergent and evolutionary search than any socialist collectivism.

I guess where this author lost me was his failure to distinguish between the coercion that lies at the heart of socialism and the personal liberty that lies at the heart of a system of natural liberty. I see the internet as an example of the latter and not the former.