Archive

How Should We Do Politics?

I think that pol­i­tics has always been sus­cep­ti­ble to con­ver­sion so that it’s not actu­al­ly about liv­ing peo­ple it’s about sig­nal­ing mem­ber­ship with­in a par­tic­u­lar community.

The Conversation #57 — Joan Blades

What I’ve seen as a founder of MoveOn is that we’ve become increas­ing­ly polar­ized. And in fact we have got­ten to the point where we have separate…realities? when it comes to a whole raft of facts. And so how can we pos­si­bly make good deci­sions togeth­er when we don’t even share basic facts? You first have to have a rela­tion­ship, and you have to have shared values.

The Conversation #5 — Andrew Keen

We’ve got two para­dox­i­cal trends hap­pen­ing at the same time. The first is what I call in my book the cult of the social,” the idea that on the net­work, every­thing has to be social and that the more you reveal about your­self the bet­ter off you are. So if your friends could know what your musi­cal taste is, where you live, what you’re wear­ing, what you’re think­ing, that’s a good thing, this cult of shar­ing. So that’s one thing that’s going on. And the oth­er thing is an increas­ing­ly rad­i­cal­ized indi­vid­u­al­ism of con­tem­po­rary, par­tic­u­lar­ly dig­i­tal, life. And these things seem to sort of coex­ist, which is para­dox­i­cal and it’s some­thing that I try to make sense of in my book.