Peer2Politics

Let’s imagine that we are living at the dawn of human history. Back then there were very small bands and tribes of 30, 40 or 50 people. The women usually went out foraging and the men went hunting. They did it in groups and when they came back from foraging or hunting they had some kind of rule that established that the elderly got this, the female got that. However, anthropologically speaking, the important thing is that the totality of the tribe was a primary entity and the individuals were part of the tribe. In anthropological terms, this is called “communal shareholding”. So at the dawn of human history, the human anthropological system was communal.

” it has been drummed into our heads for a considerable period of time that there is no alternative. One of the first things we have to do is to think about the alternative in order to move towards its creation.

“The feminist movement of recent decades has certainly brought major changes for women; more equality in the workplace, more sexual freedom and control, and a more equal social standing alongside men. But one can’t help noticing that women who achieve high positions of power, whether in business or politics, often seem to end up behaving much as men do. That is, they tend to adopt a masculine, power-oriented, competitive, logic-based approach which seems to leave little space for feminine intuition, compassion and feeling. This brings into question whether much has changed at all. For if women’s liberation has resulted in women arriving in business and politics only to behave in much the same competitive fashion as men, we can hardly claim to be on the cusp of a new paradigm!

I received a fascinating text by sociologist Margaret Archer, on the history of reflexivity, which has a very interesting thesis of why peer to peer socialisation is by necessity becoming dominant in the new generation.

“Chapter 7 is typical of the book. Here is a collection of people who record and track their everyday lives online, and then analyze and quantify their existence, from toothbrushing to reading to fecal contents. These “datasexuals” now have a social movement, of a sort, which they call the “Quantified Self” movement. It would be easy to dismiss the Quantified Selfers as harmless eccentrics if they did not have a significant presence among the opinion shapers and leading lights of Silicon Valley, and if the mindset they embody was not clearly present, if in moderated form, in the wider digital world, and if the assumptions and goals were not oozing out over the rest of us. From quantifying oneself in a private context it is a short step to the presentation of self through these numbers, and the use of them as a basis for optimization and refinement. So Morozov cites Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, who says that self tracking is a way to “acknowledge that you have bugs, that there’s new development to do on yourself” (237) so that we can algorithmically measure, tweak, and refine ourselves and our self-presentation to the world.