Women

Ooh, an online democracy conference! This looks new and shiny and exciting and empowering, doesn’t it? Boing Boing announces:

Personal Democracy Forum, NYC, May 18
This year’s Personal Democracy Forum in NYC on May 18 looks like an incredible show, with speakers like Esther Dyson, Craig “craigslist” Newmark, Eric Schmidt, Larry Lessig, Arianna Huffington and many others, discussing the theme, “The Flattening of Politics.”

Technology and the Internet are changing democracy in America. Personal Democracy Forum is a hub for the exciting conversation underway between political professionals, technologists, and anyone else invigorated by the remarkable potential of technology to engage citizens in the democratic process.

New and exciting for the same old leech-like white faces making money off it, you mean. and by ‘exciting conversation’ they mean over cocktails between those already heavy with money, influence and power.

Arianna, Esther, Craig – same old boomer faces, same old boomer politics, Democrats for ever rah rah rah, sis boom bah, must protect our nice comfortable way of life from scary fundies and scarier anticapitalists. This conference is just another Middlle Class White American (I’d’ve said Middle Class White Assholes, personally, but then I’m uncivil) share-the-profits-circle-jerk.

For ‘democratisation’ of the internets and blogging read: circle the wagons, the natives’re getting uppity.

Here’s an alternative view on the topic from Donna at The Silence of Our Friends. :

What is imperative for everyone to know, is that the majority of middle class white American people are untrustworthy and unreliable. (A handful of these people have discovered this, and those are the ones who tend to be trustworthy and reliable.) The reason for this is that they are completely self-centered. So you ask, “But Donna, isn’t everyone self-centered?” Yes, but it is the extent I am talking about. MCWAs’ are oblivious to everyone else around them and throughout the world. Only their problems, their issues, their concerns matter. Everyone else is just a “special interest”. In the blogging world, the major liberal/progressive/Democratic blogs are close to useless for informing or being informed by anyone but MCWAs. The only time people of color; poor people, including whites; those with disabilities; foreigners; labor, especially blue collar; just about anyone who isn’t a MCWA is mentioned with any concern on their blogs is when that person can be used for their agenda, not because the concern is real. Sometimes appearances is the only agenda, because when they can make themselves appear like they care, they all get to sit around and feel all warm and fuzzy and enlightened.

I gave up on the male-centered liberal mainstream blogs long ago. I thought that maybe since the women had to deal with the oppression of sexism and misogyny that I’d have more in common with them and have a place to work through our issues together. Wrong. Because they are privileged, but blind to it, they only see their issues. Since they are middle class white Americans, usually able bodied, usually heterosexual, usually white collar workers, etc they pay lip service to issues related to poverty, people of color in the US, anything about another country, anything about disability, most GLBT issues (but since some middle class white women are lesbians, this gets a little more interest), or anything having to do with blue collar workers, low level white collar, or part time/temp workers.

No, the big issues on their blogs revolve around preserving only what they already have and getting more for themselves, they really could care less if you are out in the cold looking in. Oh sure, sometimes they talk about poverty, or women in India, or immigrants in America; but look at the framing. Almost every topic leads back to how it affects them, it’s not really about the people they are using. If they don’t center it on the middle class white woman, someone (usually several) will do it in the comments. Even on our blogs, we have white people show up wanting us to reassure them that they are good people. That is tiring for those with little to keep propping up those with much. Figure out another way to work on your self esteem, like maybe doing something to make a difference, instead of whining that you don’t mean to be racist. I much prefer the ones I usually get, if they ask anything, instead of asking me to tell them that they are good people, they ask, Am I doing something wrong? What should I be doing? But I have seen this on other POC blogs and expect it as I continue blogging.

They are untrustworthy and unreliable and we should stop looking to them for any sort of help. It won’t be there. But you know something, in this country they are a minority, just like they are in the rest of the world. So whose issues are “special interests”? We the POC, the poor of all colors, the labor movement, the disabled, people from all over the world, all of us who are oppressed and truly care for each other need to come together and help each other. We don’t need them, they will soon be needing us. We will remember the ones who were by our sides and we will remember the ones who turned their backs or used us. So you middle class white feminists might want to jump on the bandwagon right about now, show some real concern for women who aren’t just like you. I’ll be happy to help you with your problems, but not at the expense of my problems, we will work TOGETHER. It’s not good enough to work on you keeping your privileges at my expense.

Well quite: that’s exactly what this conference is about, the haves keeping their privileges by forming cartels to take control of the technology so that only their voices, and voices of which they approve, are heard.

The attendees as this conference may call themselves the Democratic opposition or the netroots, or whatever they like – but at heart they don’t want to challenge the political status quo at all. They want to use technology to their own political and personal benefit, notto extend democracy to the unwashed toiling masses, who, after all, are too stupid to know what it is they want and who need an Arianna or an Esther Dyson or a John Aravosis to tell them.

No doubt the delegates (though they’re not delegates as such – no-one delegated them, they chose themselves) will feel all smug and ‘vanguard of the revolution’-ish as they network away and contemplate their new exciting roles in the sexy, exciting world of online democracy, but this is not an event for the average blogger or grassroots political activist. Look at how much it costs to go, for a start:

Registration for the Main PdF Conference includes:

Full access to the Main PDF Conference, May 18, 2007
Continental breakfast
Lunch
Networking post conference cocktail hour

Order
at $295.00 each
Price: $295.00 Processing: $0.00 Total: $295.00

Ooh, cocktails, the high life we’re living! Add on to the conference fee however much it costs to travel and rent a room in NYC and there’s not going to be much change from a thousand dollars, at a minimum. And isn’t it cute how they have the Unconference too, for the smelly poor people to maybe lap up some crumbs from the rich attendees tables while being kept away from the real powerbrokers. Isn’t that kind? Noblesse oblige.

God these people make me angry. Democratisation my ass – the MCWAs are doing what they always do, co-opting a movement built by others to their own benefit, while the real voices of the grassroots are effectively silenced. It’s not just the usual suspects either but those who were thought to be sympatico: I’ve noticed recently that the group of blogs that cluster around Atrios and Kos, all the names on the infamous email list, are pulling up ladders, erasing links, purging blogrolls and closing the drawbridges. The reformists are forming cartels and they don’t include us.

And they wonder why we hold them in contempt.