Bourgeois Apathy

Felix Stalder, in Bourgeois Anarchism, says that it is cheaper and easier than ever to communicate across time and space with individuals and groups. Every step of this communication is carried out by algorithms that create and store a record of it - what Andrejevic termed the digital enclosure. One of the dangers inherent with this is that it vastly increases the surveillance capacities of large (and, I would add, small) organizations such as the state or private corporations that bid on surveillance work.

Freedom-oriented groups in the '60s provided an "artistic critique" of capitalism, says Stalder, but this was co-opted into the current "creative industry" - anyone can be an artist online. It has lost it's revolutionary edge to the point that it is barely recognized that it ever had one.

In much the same way, small networked organizations have arisen today and have the ability, in Stalder's view, to challenge the state. Although he does talk about the privatization of security and surveillance, Stalder fails to see how even these small organizations can be co-opted to prevent any potential for real change. He even goes so far as to say that the "liberal democracy" we have and its civil society, is being weakened by these small groups. What he doesn't say is how this is not a threat to the state - but a means to the end we've been on the road to since at least the Great Depression, the New Deal and the massive expansion of executive power that came with it.