I was previously calling it the Internet of Beefs, but that isn't it either. Both those exist right now. Twitter is internet of beefs ground zero. Things like http://letter.wiki strike me as a cutely reactionary IRoL. Classical liberal theme park or something.
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What both extremes miss is in locating the heart of intellectual production in conversation. But conversation, whether acrimonious or civil, isn't at the heart of modern intellectual production. The heart is subversion.
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Thing is, you can't draw your inspiration from eras where information was scarce, and all intellectual production enjoyed essentially a blank slate/green field condition to work with, with just a few sacred monuments with labels like "aristotle" scattered about the landscape
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The environment for production today is the opposite of blank slate/green field. Every thinkable idea has not only been thought at least in an idea-squatting form already, it has been thought many times over. To produce in this context is necessarily to destroy.
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Ie we've moved from pristine to competitive forms of intellectual empire building, to borrow a pair of concepts from political science. To produce at all is to compete with an incumbency.
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Academia prefers either a cautious incrementalism, filling in the interstices of what's already been built up, or a sort of theatrical subversion that doesn't actually threaten anything, but creates some drama.
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The production mode I think We, the People of the Internet practice, is still very immature and young, but the essence of its method is to subvert the existing landscape not at the level of ideas but at the level of the very institutions that steward them.
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A treatise (ahem!) on office politics based on a folk deconstruction of a show about an Office, that lazily draws on unacknowledged historical ideas "in the water" (from say Marxist or Libertarian theorizing) that goes viral and installs a few memes in conversations, what IS it?
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It is a mistake to think of it as a product of an ersatz competitor to academia called the "blogosphere". That's not what's going on. What it does is recode the base memes of the conversation in ways that changes where the conversation is even taking place and why.
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So it is a fool's errand to go around looking to create (or identify and name in the wild) emerging "internet institutions". The mode of production is essentially extra-institutional, and its mode of impact is to reshape the landscape of institutional power.
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So if you "steal" a conversation about office politics and re-situate it in a conversation and television show criticism, you change both. The measure of your success is the degree to which you force both sides to respond to the newly activated entanglement.
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In a way, certain disciplines within academia try to do this, by trafficking internally in what they call "provocations" and "crises" and "critical conversations" but their mode ensures all subversive potential is drained before you even start.
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Just leaving the thread dangling here as a starter stub. There's something here I'm driving at that I can't clearly see myself.
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Okay another point. Besides subversion, there is an element of deep solipsism to how we produce. This is why the focus on "debate" and "conversation" feels like missing the point. I'm happy to debate where that helps, but generally, I'm off on an exit bunytrail, not voice
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The QA function of conversation/peer review, which is highly ceremonialized in academia is turned into a conscious risk management choice in internet mode. Do you want to go out on a limb on your own, or derisk early. Former is not a choice in academia.
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Because of deep ties to the way university research is funded, academic mode production has a ceremonialized fail-fast aspect to it. Going off on your own spirit quest on a topic for 5 years is career suicide. Publish and get past ornery peer reviewers frequently or perish.
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This may be why the dream of institutionalizing independent research is wishful thinking. If you want others to pay, you're going to be subject yourself to early, conservative QA. No funding source will pay for a world of extended solipsistic questing.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1195789557465153536 …
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