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* Book: Sociofobia, El cambio político. César Rendueles.

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Contextual Citation

" A society whose economy is based on the pursuit of private profit is doomed to make a suboptimal use of many technologies. It is a dilemma that has deepened in social media. They are a test tube where we can observe not only the contradictions of capitalism but also of those who are opposed to it. The Internet brings to light the limitations of the market in taking over an environment of abundance, but also the limitations of some very rude anti-institutional critics. The networks offer immense political possibilities, but for them to be realized we have to decide how much cooperation, market competition and public intervention we need. I think that in order to overcome the failures of both the market and collaborative spontaneity we need more public (not necessarily governmental) institutional intervention." (http://networkcultures.org/geert/2014/10/25/conversation-with-spanish-social-critic-cesar-rendueles/)


Introduction

Geert Lovink:

"At a conference in Barcelona in June 2014 I ran into Madrid-based critic César Rendueles who told me about the success of his book Sociofobia, El cambio político en la era de la utopia digital in the Spanish speaking world, published late 2013. On the cover it reads: “the ideology of the network has generated a diminished social reality.” Rendueles (b. 1975) used to work for the cultural organization Círculo de Bellas Artes and now teaches at Complutense University, Madrid. I would characterize Rendueles’ approach as that of a straight forward academic, without the customary doubt, double meanings and postmodern cynicism, amplified by a clear populist-left set of demands (inspired by Latin-America) to re-nationalize public infrastructure, in this case the mix of telecom, knowledge production, education and media. This southern European variety of “cybersocialism” stands in contrast to the Blairist “third way” that originated in northwestern Europe and accepted limited state intervention in economic ownership. It is also distinct from a “commons” approach, where the commons are governed by an undefined coalition of “stakeholders” in which the real power of both monopoly corporate players and the state is obscured. Instead, Rendueles focuses on a more traditional analysis of economic and political institutions, one that may pave the way for political transformation in the technological field.

Why hasn’t Sociofobia been translated yet? Of course one can blame the slow politics of the publishing world with their outdated copyright system that hampers free cultural exchange within Europe and the absence of a subsidy system for translations of crucial cultural texts within the EU realm. How can Italian readers find out about the lively “post-Snowden” debates in Berlin? Should I perform the usual public self-criticism, admitting that I once preferred the sensual Italian over the harsh Spanish language – and now bear the consequences? Having said which, the book will come out in German (Suhrkamp) and in the United States – two years late." (http://networkcultures.org/geert/2014/10/25/conversation-with-spanish-social-critic-cesar-rendueles/)


Interview

Geert Lovink: Can you tell us what Sociofobia is all about? When I heard the title I was confused, and intrigued. What would it mean to be “sociophobic” in the age of social media?

César Rendueles: For many years I have been interested in authors that analyze the weakening of social bonds in capitalist postmodernity: Richard Sennett, Robert Castel, Jacques Donzelot, Guy Standing and, more recently, Karl Polanyi and Christopher Lasch. They all raise different ideas, but agree on two theses: first, we live in increasingly individualized societies, characterized by weak ties that generate many psychological, ethical, cultural and political problems. And second, social weakness is related to mercantilist processes. Market competition destroys the social fabric, the anthropological basis for the survival of any group of people. As Robert Putnam has shown empirically, the implementation of the neoliberal agenda from the seventies is associated with a massive undermining of civil society, “associationism” and community life in western countries.

My contribution to this theoretical tradition has been to analyze the relationship between processes of social weakening and emancipatory political projects. The political Left has indicated that democracy and social justice have institutional conditions – such as freedom of speech or the rule of law – but also material conditions: if you’re an illiterate who lives in the garbage dump of Managua, freedom of expression seems like a bad joke. I think emancipation implies certain social conditions too. Democracy, equality and freedom are impossible in the social wasteland of neoliberalism. It’s important not to confuse contemporary social atomization – a kind of random suffering-filled drift – with freedom as a complex project that requires some degree of cooperation and mutual support, as Martha Nussbaum has shown.

That was how I came to wonder about the political role of social media. I found it surprising that the contemporary process of social weakening coexists with a technological ideology that extols cooperation and community building when they are mediated by digital technologies and derided in any other case. For example, in the Basque Country lies one of the largest cooperatives in the world, the Mondragón Group, which employs 80,000 workers. However, it has received little academic attention. The media belittle it as an outdated model, and it has even been suggested that it has links with Basque terrorism. However, small technological cooperation projects with just a few people involved receive enormous attention and their failures and weaknesses tend to be overlooked.

Summarizing it for the sake of brevity, I think that hegemonic understandings of social media promote the generalization of an institutional model similar to the market. It involves a social and political mistrust that has important similarities with economic liberalism. Liberals believe that in complex societies it is impossible or extremely expensive to achieve consensus through political deliberation. When we try to reach agreements in mass societies we always risk triggering violent conflict or the oppression of minorities. That is the reason why they think it is preferable to promote the commercialization of the greatest number of social areas. This should facilitate the emergence of spontaneous coordination that requires no discussion or agreement but is the result of the aggregation of preferences through the mechanism of supply and demand.

I think the enthusiasm for social media responds to a similar impulse: a deep wariness of democratic deliberation and, therefore, a commitment to spontaneous coordination. We do not feel able to think together and build institutions. That’s why we seek technological aggregation mechanisms that unite us without reaching consensus. We do not feel able to do things together; but technology allows us to do them anyway.

I would define “sociophobia” as a distrust in the possibility that egalitarian political participation allows us to solve our collective challenges. And “cyber-fetishism” as the claim that communication technologies provide a solution to this problem by establishing some kind of social relation dense enough to allow cooperation, cool enough to not require deliberative processes. In Sociofobia my main interest is not technological theory but political criticism. Analysis of mainstream technological ideology can help us to redefine important aspects of the emancipatory project.


...


GL: Do you have colleagues in the Spanish-speaking world? Where in Spain do you see critical and artistic practices evolving? We know about the alternative social media platform Lorea. What else?

CR: I was interested in the Spanish open movement during its early years but I moved away from it. I think it shares much with the hegemonic political and social discourse. For example, the predominance of free software initiatives has led to neglecting the problems of cultural workers. Many of the proposals that were made seemed to me classist and unrelated to the Spanish social reality. In fact, during the golden years of the Spanish housing bubble there was a blooming of artistic and cultural institutions interested in free culture, but always from a very formal and elitist point of view.

Things have changed since 2008. Today there are strong social movements that demand political, social and economic democracy and that is reflected in our understanding of collaborative technology. I usually say that 15M and the Occupy movement showed that technology is very good when people take to the streets but much worse at getting people to the street. Spanish social movements have taught us what we can expect from technology if we change the political scene. Parties like Podemos are using technology to accelerate and increase political deliberation in the context of a process of popular empowerment. I have high hopes for what might happen in Latin America. Countries like Ecuador, Bolivia or Venezuela have spent years trying, with varying fortunes, to deepen the process of democratization. And in that context the commitment to free knowledge can have explosive effects. Digital collaborative tools have a completely different meaning in a place that has opted for social justice after having suffered decades of neoliberal assault." (http://networkcultures.org/geert/2014/10/25/conversation-with-spanish-social-critic-cesar-rendueles/)