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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Not quite it. That's something that academia does internally all the time as well. The key point is doing it in a way that subverts existing institutions and destabilizes them.
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